The Best Proxies in 2026: A Buyer's Guide to Choosing the Right Provider

Why "best proxies" depends on what you're doing

Search for the best proxies and you get a wall of listicles that all crown a different winner. That isn't because everybody is lying (although some are paid to). It's because a proxy is a tool, and the right tool depends on the job. A proxy that is perfect for checking ad placements in Brazil may be a disaster for copping a sneaker drop on a Shopify store, and the proxy that wins every sneaker release might cost ten times too much for scraping a few thousand product pages a day.

So this guide doesn't hand you one name. It gives you a framework for working out which type of proxy you need, which pricing model fits your traffic, and which providers are worth shortlisting for that combination. If you only read one article on this site before buying, make it this one. Then go deeper with our dedicated guides to residential proxies, cheap proxies, sneaker proxies and Puppeteer proxies.

The four proxy types, and when each one is the best choice

Almost every commercial proxy you can buy falls into one of four buckets. Understanding them is 80% of the buying decision.

Residential proxies route your traffic through devices on ordinary home connections. Websites see a Comcast or BT customer, not a server, which makes these proxies far harder to block. They are usually sold by the gigabyte and they rotate through huge pools of IPs. If your target uses serious bot protection, residential is usually the starting point.

ISP proxies are the hybrid. The IPs are registered to consumer internet providers, so they look residential, but they're hosted on fast datacenter hardware, so they're quick and they don't disappear when someone switches off their router. You get the same IP for as long as you pay for it. That's why ISP proxies dominate the sneaker world and are popular for managing accounts.

Datacenter proxies come from cloud and hosting companies. They're the fastest and cheapest proxies available, but websites can identify them easily because the IP ranges are publicly registered to hosting companies. For sites without aggressive protection, they're unbeatable value.

Mobile proxies use IPs from cellular carriers. Because hundreds or thousands of real phone users share each carrier IP through CGNAT, websites are extremely reluctant to block them. They're the most trusted and the most expensive.

For a deeper side-by-side, read residential vs datacenter proxies and ISP vs residential proxies.

The best proxies by use case

Here is the short version: the proxy type we'd start with for each common job, and the article where we go into detail.

What actually makes a proxy provider "the best"

When we evaluate a provider, these are the criteria that matter, roughly in order of importance for most buyers.

1. Success rate on your targets

A proxy that gets blocked is worthless no matter how cheap it is. Success rate is the percentage of requests that come back with the content you wanted, rather than a block page, a CAPTCHA or a timeout. It varies enormously by target. A provider can hit near-perfect success on one retailer and struggle on another. That's why the single most important step in buying proxies is to test them on your own targets before you commit.

2. Pool quality, not just pool size

Providers love to advertise pool size: "50 million IPs", "100 million IPs". The number is mostly marketing. What matters is how many of those IPs are online at a given moment in the country you need, and how clean they are. A smaller pool of IPs that haven't been abused will outperform a huge pool that is already flagged across half the web. Our guide to proxy pool size explains how to read these claims, and IP reputation and proxies explains why clean IPs matter.

3. Targeting options

Can you choose the country? The state or city? The ASN (the specific ISP)? Do you need it? For ad verification and local SEO, city targeting is essential. For general scraping, country-level is usually enough, and paying extra for granular targeting is wasted money. See geo-targeted proxies.

4. Session control

Rotating proxies give you a new IP for each request. Sticky sessions keep the same IP for a set time, typically from one minute up to 30 minutes or more. Logging into accounts, completing checkouts and running browser automation all need sticky sessions. Make sure the provider offers the session length you need. Read sticky vs rotating sessions.

5. Speed and stability

Measure two things: response time (latency) and connection failure rate. Residential proxies are inherently slower than datacenter ones, because traffic hops through a real consumer device, but a good residential network should still deliver consistent sub-second responses on most targets. Our proxy speed test guide shows how to benchmark fairly.

6. Pricing that fits your traffic

The cheapest headline price is often not the cheapest proxy. A residential plan at a low price per GB is expensive if you burn through gigabytes loading images you don't need. A datacenter plan with "unlimited bandwidth" is cheap until half your requests fail. Work out your cost per successful request. Our proxy pricing guide walks through the math.

7. Ethics and compliance

Residential IPs come from real people's devices. Reputable providers get explicit consent, usually through SDKs in apps that pay users or remove ads in exchange for sharing bandwidth. Less reputable ones have historically used malware or buried consent in terms nobody reads. If your company has a compliance team, they will care. See ethically sourced proxies and how proxy providers source IPs.

8. Support, dashboard and documentation

When a drop goes live or a scraper breaks at 2 a.m., support matters. So do clear docs, usage statistics, sub-users and an API for managing your account. Read proxy provider support and SLAs.

Providers worth shortlisting in 2026

The proxy market is crowded, and new names appear every month. These are providers that are consistently well known in the industry, grouped by where they tend to fit. This isn't a ranking, and no provider paid to appear in it. (We are affiliates of Geonode, Webshare and Rayobyte, which we disclose on every page, and we cover those three separately below.) Features and prices change constantly, so treat this as a starting shortlist and test before you buy.

Large, full-stack providers

Bright Data and Oxylabs are the two names most associated with the enterprise end of the market. Both offer every proxy type (residential, ISP, datacenter, mobile), plus higher-level products such as web unlockers and scraping APIs. Expect strong targeting options, compliance documentation and account management, and expect to pay premium prices. They suit businesses that need scale, compliance paperwork and support. Compare them in Bright Data vs Oxylabs, or see Bright Data alternatives and Oxylabs alternatives.

Mid-market, value-focused providers

Decodo (the company formerly known as Smartproxy) built its reputation on offering a broad product range at friendlier prices with a simple dashboard. SOAX is known for flexible targeting across residential and mobile pools. NetNut emphasises ISP-sourced residential and static IPs. These are often the sweet spot for growing teams. See Decodo / Smartproxy alternatives.

Budget and specialist providers

IPRoyal is popular with smaller buyers, partly because its residential traffic doesn't expire. Webshare is well known for inexpensive datacenter proxies and a small free plan. Rayobyte (formerly Blazing SEO) has a long history in datacenter and ISP proxies and now sells every major proxy type; see our Rayobyte proxies guide. There are also many smaller sneaker-focused resellers. See cheapest proxy providers, Webshare alternatives and IPRoyal alternatives.

For full comparison tables by proxy type, see:

• Residential proxy providers compared
• Datacenter proxy providers compared
• ISP proxy providers compared
• Mobile proxy providers compared

Where Geonode fits on a shortlist

We're a Geonode affiliate, so we'll be upfront about that and then be specific about why it belongs on many buyers' shortlists, and when it doesn't. Geonode is a good example of the "one account, several proxy types" provider that suits growing teams: you can start with a small residential balance, add other products as you learn what your targets need, and avoid locking into a large monthly commitment before you have real data.

What Geonode sells

At the time of writing, Geonode's lineup covers most of the products discussed in this guide:

The residential network supports rotating and sticky sessions (Geonode lists sticky sessions of up to 24 hours), targeting by country, state, city and ASN, and HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. Geonode says its residential IPs come from opt-in partners, which is exactly the kind of sourcing statement you should ask every provider for. See ethically sourced proxies.

Who Geonode suits

• Buyers who want to test before committing. Non-expiring residential bandwidth means a small purchase can be used over weeks of testing, rather than vanishing at the end of a billing cycle. That fits the buying process we recommend later in this guide. See pay-as-you-go proxies.
• Teams that need more than one proxy type. A typical setup mixes residential traffic for protected targets, a handful of static ISP IPs for logged-in work, and cheaper datacenter traffic for easy targets. Having those under one dashboard makes cost tracking simpler.
• Developers building scrapers and AI tools. Alongside raw proxies, Geonode offers scraping APIs and an MCP server for AI agents. If you're deciding between running your own proxies and paying per page, it lets you try both. See scraping API vs proxies and Geonode for AI agents.
• Marketers and account managers who use antidetect browsers. Geonode lists integrations with AdsPower, Dolphin{anty}, GoLogin, MoreLogin and Incogniton. See Geonode with antidetect browsers.

When to look elsewhere

• You need dedicated mobile carrier proxies. Geonode's core lineup is residential, ISP and datacenter. If your targets demand true 4G or 5G carrier IPs, compare specialists in mobile proxy providers compared.
• You need enterprise procurement paperwork on day one: custom contracts, security questionnaires, named account managers. The largest providers are built for that. See enterprise proxy providers.
• Your only target is easy. If datacenter IPs work everywhere you go, the cheapest datacenter specialist may beat any multi-product provider. See cheap datacenter proxies.

How to evaluate Geonode fairly

Treat Geonode like any other candidate. Buy a small residential balance, run the test plan described in the next sections against your real targets, and record success rate, median and p95 latency, and GB per successful page. Then run the same plan on one or two competitors. If Geonode wins on cost per successful request for your workload, scale up. If it doesn't, you've spent very little finding out. Our Geonode proxies review goes deeper on the products, and the Geonode use cases section covers specific jobs, from web scraping to sneaker bots and SEO rank tracking.

How much should you pay for proxies?

Prices have fallen steadily over the past few years as competition has grown. Rough market ranges at the time of writing:

If a deal looks dramatically cheaper than these ranges, ask why. Sometimes it's a genuine bargain or a promotion. Often it's a shared pool, a resold network, or traffic that expires in a week. Read proxy buying mistakes and proxy provider red flags before chasing the lowest number.

A step-by-step buying process

1. Define the job. Write down the target sites, the countries you need, how many requests per day, and whether you need to log in or hold a session.
2. Pick the proxy type using the tables above. If in doubt, start with rotating residential.
3. Estimate volume. For per-GB pricing, load a few target pages in a browser with the network tab open and add up the transfer size. Multiply by your daily page count. See proxy bandwidth pricing explained.
4. Shortlist two or three providers. Use our proxy provider checklist.
5. Use trials or small plans. Most providers offer a trial, a refund window or a small pay-as-you-go plan. See proxy free trials and pay-as-you-go proxies.
6. Test on your real targets for success rate, speed and cost per successful request.
7. Commit to the winner, but keep a small backup plan with a second provider. Outages and pool degradation happen to everyone.

Mistakes that make good proxies look bad

Many "these proxies don't work" complaints are actually configuration problems:

• Rotating every request while logged in. Websites flag a session that jumps between IPs in different cities. Use sticky sessions.
• Ignoring browser fingerprints. A premium residential IP won't save a headless browser that announces itself as a bot. See browser fingerprinting and proxies.
• Sending too many requests per IP. Respect rate limits even when you rotate. See rate limiting and proxies.
• Mismatched geography. A US IP with a browser set to German language and a Tokyo timezone looks suspicious.
• DNS and WebRTC leaks that reveal your real location. See DNS leaks and WebRTC leaks.

Five shifts shaping proxy buying in 2026

The fundamentals in this guide don't change from year to year, but the market around them does. Five shifts are worth keeping in mind when you shop:

1. Sourcing is a due-diligence item now. In June 2025 the FBI warned that the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, built from infected consumer devices, was supplying residential proxy services. Expect good providers to explain consent and customer checks clearly. See ethically sourced proxies.
2. Bundles are the norm. Larger providers sell proxies alongside unblockers, scraping APIs and ready-made datasets. Compare like with like: a per-GB proxy price and a per-result API price answer different questions. See web unblocker proxies.
3. Brands change. Smartproxy now trades as Decodo, for example. Search for reviews under both old and new names. See Decodo (Smartproxy) alternatives.
4. Websites are stricter with automated traffic. The surge in AI crawling has pushed many sites to tighten their bot rules. Budget for higher-trust IPs on more targets, and respect opt-outs. See AI training data proxies.
5. Tooling got easier. Node.js 24 can read standard proxy environment variables natively, and Puppeteer supports a separate proxy per browser context. Setups that once needed extra libraries are now built in. See Node.js proxies and a different proxy per page in Puppeteer.

None of these change the core method: pick the proxy type for the job, test on your real targets, and compare cost per successful request rather than headline prices.

How to test proxies like a professional

Everyone says "test before you buy". Very few people say how. A test that runs fifty requests against Google and looks at the ping is almost useless, because it measures the wrong target with too few samples. Here's the method we use, and it works whether you're comparing two providers or twenty.

Step 1: Write down the job in numbers

Before you touch a proxy, describe the workload precisely:

• Targets: the actual domains and page types you'll hit. "Amazon product pages" and "Amazon search results" behave differently, so list both if you need both.
• Locations: the countries, states or cities you need, and whether location must be exact or approximate.
• Volume: requests per day, and the peak per minute.
• Session needs: do you need to log in, hold a cart, or paginate through results on the same IP?
• Method: plain HTTP client, headless browser, or both.

This takes ten minutes and prevents the most common testing mistake, which is testing a different job from the one you'll actually run.

Step 2: Build a small, fair test harness

You don't need special software. A short script that sends requests through each proxy and records the outcome is enough. For each request, log:

1. The timestamp and the provider being tested.
2. The target URL and page type.
3. The HTTP status code.
4. Whether the response contained the content you wanted (check for a known element, not just the status code, because many blocks return a 200 with a CAPTCHA page).
5. Time to first byte and total time.
6. Bytes transferred.
7. The exit IP and its reported location, if you can get them.

Run providers in an interleaved order rather than one after another, so a temporary problem on the target site doesn't unfairly penalise whoever happened to run during it. See how to test proxies before buying and proxy speed test for code.

Step 3: Use enough samples

A few dozen requests can't distinguish a 92% success rate from a 97% one. As a rough guide, aim for at least 500 requests per target per provider for a first comparison, and a few thousand before a large purchase. Spread them across several hours, ideally including the time of day when you'll run production jobs, because residential pools change size and behaviour with human routines.

Step 4: Measure the four numbers that matter

That last number is what you should use to pick a winner. A provider that costs twice as much per GB but succeeds three times as often on your target is the cheaper option.

Step 5: Check the less obvious things

• Geo accuracy. Look up a sample of exit IPs in two or three IP location databases. If you're paying for city targeting, check that the cities are right.
• IP diversity. Count unique IPs and unique /24 subnets per 1,000 requests. Lots of repeats suggest a smaller live pool than advertised. See proxy pool size.
• Session stability. If you need sticky sessions, hold ten of them for the full length you need and note how many drop early.
• Error types. Timeouts, connection resets and 407 errors point to provider problems; 403s and CAPTCHAs point to blocking. See common proxy errors.

Step 6: Re-test regularly

Proxy quality drifts. A provider that wins in March can slip by June as a target changes its defences or a pool gets overused. Keep your harness, run a small version monthly, and you'll spot problems before they hit your budget. If you need a cheap way to keep a second provider warm for comparisons, non-expiring residential traffic from a provider such as Geonode works well, because the balance stays put between tests.

The best proxies by type, in depth

The table near the top of this guide gives the short version. Here's the longer one: how to choose well within each proxy type, because the gap between a good and a bad residential provider is as large as the gap between residential and datacenter.

Choosing the best residential proxies

Residential proxies are the default for protected sites, so they're where most buyers spend most of their money. When comparing residential offers, look past the headline pool size and ask:

• How many IPs are live in my countries right now? A provider with fewer total IPs but deep coverage in your markets beats a giant pool that's thin where you need it.
• What does targeting cost? Some providers include state, city and ASN targeting in the base price; others charge more or route targeted traffic through a smaller pool.
• How long can sessions last, and do they hold? Checkout flows and logged-in scraping need sessions that last as long as advertised. Test it.
• Does traffic expire? Monthly plans that reset unused GB are fine for steady users and expensive for irregular ones.
• What protocols are supported? HTTP and HTTPS are universal. SOCKS5 matters for some tools and non-web traffic. See SOCKS5 proxies.
• How is the network sourced? After several botnet-backed proxy services were shut down, sourcing is a real risk factor. See how proxy providers source IPs.

For a full comparison, read best residential proxies, residential proxy providers compared and our pillar on residential proxies.

Choosing the best ISP proxies

ISP proxies live or die on their subnets. Because they're static IPs registered to consumer ISPs but hosted in datacenters, a provider usually has a limited number of IP ranges. If one of those ranges gets flagged on your target, every IP in it suffers. When you buy ISP proxies:

• Ask which ISPs and ASNs the IPs belong to, and spread purchases across several if you can.
• Ask about replacement policy. A good provider swaps IPs that arrive already banned on major targets.
• Check whether IPs are dedicated or shared. Shared ISP proxies are cheaper, but someone else's behaviour affects your reputation.
• Confirm bandwidth terms. Most ISP proxies come with unmetered or generous bandwidth, which makes them excellent value for heavy, long-running sessions.

ISP proxies are the best choice for account management, long logged-in sessions and sneaker proxies checkout tasks. See best ISP proxies and ISP proxy providers compared.

Choosing the best datacenter proxies

Datacenter proxies are a commodity, which is good news for buyers: prices are low and quality differences are easy to measure. What separates good from bad:

• Subnet diversity. Many /24s across several ASNs are better than thousands of IPs in one block.
• Abuse history. Recycled IPs from previous abuse arrive pre-blocked. Test against your targets before committing.
• Dedicated vs shared. Dedicated IPs cost more but you control their reputation. See dedicated proxies and shared proxies.
• Rotating vs static. Rotating datacenter pools are useful for spreading load across many IPs without managing a list. See rotating datacenter proxies.

The best datacenter proxies are the ones that work on your targets for the lowest cost per success. See best datacenter proxies and datacenter proxy providers compared.

Choosing the best mobile proxies

Mobile proxies are the specialist's tool. They're expensive, so only buy them when residential and ISP proxies have genuinely failed. When you do:

• Ask whether the IPs come from real carrier connections (dedicated modems or phones on a carrier) or from a peer network of phones. Both exist, and they behave differently.
• Check rotation control. Good mobile proxies let you trigger an IP change on demand or on a timer.
• Look at carrier and city coverage for your target market.
• Test speed carefully. Mobile connections vary much more than wired ones.

See best mobile proxies, 5G mobile proxies and mobile vs residential proxies.

The best proxies for your kind of team

Use case matters, but so does who you are. A solo developer and an enterprise data team buying for the same use case should often buy different things.

Solo developers and hobbyists

You need low commitment, good documentation and a forgiving dashboard. Avoid annual plans and large monthly minimums. Start with:

• A small pay-as-you-go residential balance for protected targets.
• A handful of cheap datacenter proxies for everything else.
• A free tier or trial for experiments.

Geonode, IPRoyal and Webshare are common starting points at this level. Geonode is useful if you want residential, ISP and datacenter under one login without a subscription. See best proxies for beginners and cheap proxies.

Startups and small data teams

You'll care about predictable cost, sub-users for teammates and an API for usage data. Budget for one primary provider and one backup. Track cost per successful request weekly. A mid-market or flexible provider usually fits better than an enterprise contract at this stage, because your usage will change a lot in the first year. See proxy pricing guide.

Agencies

Agencies run many small, separate jobs for different clients: ad checks in one country, rank tracking in another, social accounts for a third. Prioritise:

• Sub-users or separate credentials per client, so usage can be billed back and one leak doesn't expose everyone.
• City targeting for local SEO and ad verification.
• Static ISP IPs for client social accounts, one per account.

See social media management proxies, ad verification proxies and Geonode for marketing agencies.

E-commerce brands

Price and stock monitoring, MAP enforcement and marketplace research are typical. You'll need residential proxies for the big retailers and marketplaces, and you'll care about consistency over months more than raw speed. See price monitoring proxies, best proxies for e-commerce scraping and amazon scraping proxies.

Researchers and academics

Usually modest volume, strict ethics requirements, and a need to document methods. Prioritise providers with clear sourcing statements, use the lowest-trust proxy that works, respect robots.txt and rate limits, and record exactly which proxy configuration produced which data. See ethical web scraping and Geonode for academic research.

Enterprises

You'll need security reviews, data processing agreements, invoicing, SLAs and named support. You'll also negotiate. Start with providers built for enterprise procurement, but don't skip testing: big contracts deserve bigger test samples, not smaller ones. See enterprise proxy providers and proxy provider support and SLAs.

Features beyond IPs that separate good providers from great ones

Two providers can sell similar IPs and still be very different to work with. These features rarely appear in headline comparisons but matter in daily use.

Authentication options

The best providers support both username and password authentication and IP whitelisting. Whitelisting is cleaner for servers with fixed IPs and works with tools that can't send proxy credentials. Username authentication is better for laptops, changing IPs and per-session parameters. See proxy authentication methods.

Endpoint generators

A good dashboard turns your choices (country, session type, session length) into ready-to-paste endpoints in the format your tool expects: host:port:user:pass, user:pass@host:port, or a full URL. That saves a surprising amount of time and avoids syntax errors.

Sub-users and usage limits

Being able to create separate credentials with their own traffic caps is essential for teams and agencies. It lets you limit a runaway script, bill clients accurately, and revoke one person's access without changing everyone's password.

Usage statistics and logs

You want per-day and per-sub-user usage, ideally by target domain. Without it, you can't tell which job is eating your bandwidth. Some providers also show active sticky sessions, which helps when debugging.

An account API

If you manage proxies programmatically (creating sub-users, checking balance, rotating credentials), an API saves hours. Check what it covers before you rely on it.

Browser extensions

For manual work such as checking ads or local search results, a browser extension that switches proxies in one click is far easier than changing system settings. Geonode, for example, offers a Chrome extension. See browser proxy settings and using Geonode in Chrome.

Protocol and IPv6 support

HTTP and HTTPS are standard. SOCKS5 matters for some desktop tools, games and non-HTTP traffic. IPv6 proxies are cheap and plentiful but only work on targets that support IPv6. See IPv6 proxies and IPv4 vs IPv6 proxies.

Block lists and target restrictions

Reputable providers block certain targets (banking logins, government portals, some ticketing sites) to prevent abuse. Check that your legitimate targets aren't on the list before you buy. Some dashboards also let you add your own block list, which is useful for stopping a script from wasting bandwidth on ad and tracking domains.

Reading proxy marketing claims critically

Proxy marketing is full of large numbers. Here's how to read the common ones.

"Over 100 million IPs"

This is usually the number of unique IPs seen over a long period, often a month or more, not the number available right now. Residential IPs churn constantly, so a cumulative count can be many times larger than the live pool. Ask how many IPs are live in your target countries at a typical hour. See proxy pool size.

"99.9% success rate"

Success on what? Measured how? A provider's average across all customers and targets says almost nothing about your target. Some vendors measure success as "the connection completed", which counts a CAPTCHA page as a success. Only your own tests are meaningful.

"195 countries"

Most providers can technically produce an IP in almost every country, but coverage in smaller countries may be a handful of devices. If you need Peru, Kenya or Vietnam, test those specifically.

"Unlimited bandwidth"

Unlimited usually means unmetered within a fair-use policy, a thread or connection limit, or a speed cap. It can be excellent value, but read the limits. See unlimited bandwidth proxies.

"Ethically sourced"

A phrase anyone can use. Look for specifics: which apps or SDKs recruit peers, how consent is collected, whether peers are paid, and whether the provider vets its own customers. See ethically sourced proxies.

"Undetectable"

No proxy is undetectable. Detection depends on IP, browser fingerprint, TLS fingerprint and behaviour. A provider that promises invisibility is selling a feeling, not a feature. See browser fingerprinting and proxies.

Review sites and "top 10" lists

Many review sites, including this one, earn affiliate commissions. That doesn't make their information wrong, but it's a reason to look for method, specifics and admitted weaknesses rather than star ratings. We say clearly which provider we're affiliated with (Geonode), and our advice throughout is to test any provider, including that one, on your own targets.

The best proxies at every budget

What you can sensibly buy changes a lot with budget. These tiers assume monthly spend and typical market prices at the time of writing.

Under $20 a month

At this level you're learning, testing or running a small personal project.

• What works: a few GB of pay-as-you-go residential traffic for protected targets, or a small pack of shared or dedicated datacenter proxies for easy ones.
• What to avoid: monthly residential subscriptions with expiring traffic, and mobile proxies.
• Key habit: fetch HTML only, cache aggressively, and keep a log of bytes per page so you know what a bigger project would cost.

Non-expiring residential bandwidth is especially useful here, because a $10 purchase can last for months of occasional use. Geonode and IPRoyal both sell residential traffic that way. See pay-as-you-go proxies and proxy free trials.

$20 to $200 a month

Small businesses, freelancers and side projects that run every day.

• What works: a mid-sized residential balance (tens of GB) plus a handful of ISP proxies for accounts, or a larger datacenter pool if your targets allow it.
• What to add: sub-users for each project, so you can see where the money goes.
• Key habit: a monthly cost review, ranking targets by cost per successful request.

This is where most buyers first feel the difference between "cheap per GB" and "cheap per success". Our cheap proxies guide has worked scenarios at this level.

$200 to $2,000 a month

Growing data teams, agencies with several clients, serious sneaker groups.

• What works: a primary residential provider on a volume tier, a backup provider with a small balance, ISP proxies sized to your accounts, and datacenter capacity for easy targets.
• What to add: monitoring of success rate per domain, alerts on drops, and a routing table that sends each domain to the cheapest proxy type that works.
• Key habit: quarterly re-tests of your primary against one or two alternatives.

At this level, negotiating is realistic. Providers will often discount annual commitments or match competitors' volume prices. See proxy pricing guide.

Over $2,000 a month

Established data businesses and enterprises.

• What works: contracts with committed volume, multiple providers for resilience, scraping APIs or unblockers for the hardest targets, and possibly unlimited residential plans if your residential volume is high and steady.
• What to add: security reviews, data processing agreements, SLAs and named support.
• Key habit: treat proxies as infrastructure, with owners, budgets and incident reviews.

Flat-rate plans start to make sense when per-GB bills grow large and predictable. Geonode, for example, offers unlimited residential plans priced by speed tier rather than by GB. Model your real traffic before switching, because a flat plan is only cheaper if you use it heavily. See unlimited bandwidth proxies and Geonode unlimited residential proxies.

Questions to ask a provider before you buy

Sales pages are written to sell. A short conversation with support or sales tells you much more. Here are the questions we ask, and what good and bad answers sound like.

You don't need perfect answers to every question, but a provider that dodges several is telling you something. See proxy provider checklist and proxy provider red flags.

Understanding proxy performance

Proxy speed is often misunderstood. "This proxy is slow" can mean several different things, and each has a different fix.

Latency

Latency is the delay before data starts arriving. Through a proxy, it adds up across hops: your machine to the proxy gateway, the gateway to the exit node, the exit node to the website, and back. Residential exits add extra delay because home connections and devices are slower than servers. To reduce latency:

• Run your client close to the proxy gateway.
• Choose exits in the same region as the target's servers.
• Reuse connections where the target allows it.

Throughput

Throughput is how much data per second you can move once a connection is established. It matters for large downloads and media-heavy pages. Datacenter and ISP proxies usually win; residential throughput depends on the exit device's connection.

Concurrency

Concurrency is how many requests you run at once. Many plans limit simultaneous connections or threads. Total pages per hour is roughly concurrency divided by average request time, so increasing concurrency is often a better fix for "slow" scraping than finding a faster proxy. Be careful, though: high concurrency against one target is exactly what rate limits are designed to catch. See rate limiting and proxies.

Tail latency

The slowest 5% of requests (p95) often matter more than the average, because they hold up batches and trigger timeouts. A provider with a slightly worse median but a much better p95 may finish your jobs faster. Always look at both numbers. See proxy speed test.

Timeouts and retries

Set timeouts long enough for honest slow responses (often 30 to 60 seconds for residential through a browser) and short enough that a dead exit doesn't stall a worker. Retry with a new IP rather than the same one, and cap retries so a blocked target doesn't burn your budget.

How to switch proxy providers without downtime

Sooner or later, you'll want to move: a better price, a better pool, or a provider that's slipping. Done carelessly, a switch causes outages and data gaps. Done well, nobody notices.

1. Abstract your proxy configuration. Store the gateway, port, credentials and parameter syntax in configuration, not scattered through code. A small helper that builds a proxy URL from options (country, session, sticky time) means you change one file to switch.
2. Map the parameter syntax. Every provider encodes targeting and sessions differently in the username or port. Write the mapping down and test each option you use.
3. Run in parallel. Send 5 to 10% of traffic through the new provider for a week, using the same success and cost metrics as your current one.
4. Compare per domain, not overall. A provider can be better on most targets and worse on your most important one.
5. Ramp gradually: 25%, 50%, 100%, with a quick rollback switch.
6. Keep the old provider on a small balance for a month as a fallback.
7. Update allow-lists and whitelists. If targets or partners allow-list your IPs, or your provider whitelists your servers, update both sides.

Providers with non-expiring traffic make this easier, since the parallel test doesn't require a full monthly plan. That's one reason we suggest keeping a flexible provider such as Geonode in your stack even if it isn't your primary.

Lessons from real buying mistakes

Every one of these stories is a composite of situations we see again and again. Each ends with what fixed it.

The scraper that cost ten times its budget

A team moved a price-tracking job from datacenter to residential proxies because one retailer started blocking them. They didn't change their headless browser setup, which loaded every image and video on every page. The residential bill was ten times the forecast. Fix: block images, fonts and media; fetch the retailer's JSON endpoint for prices where possible; and send only that retailer through residential while everything else stayed on datacenter. The bill dropped by more than 80%.

The social accounts that kept getting checked

An agency put 15 client accounts on rotating residential proxies to "look like real users". Every login came from a different city, and the platform kept triggering security checks. Fix: one static ISP proxy per account in the client's region, with a matching browser profile. Security checks stopped almost entirely. See social media management proxies.

The sneaker group with one bad subnet

A group bought 100 ISP proxies from a single seller for a big release. All of them came from the same subnet, which had been flagged on the target site the week before. Nothing checked out. Fix: buy from two or three sources, ask sellers which sites a batch performs on, and spread tasks across subnets. See sneaker proxies banned fix.

The "unlimited" plan that wasn't

A buyer chose an unlimited plan for a large crawl. It turned out to cap concurrent connections at a level that made the crawl take three weeks instead of three days. Fix: read the thread or concurrency limit, not just the bandwidth promise, and model throughput before buying. See unlimited bandwidth proxies.

The free proxy that stole a session

A developer tested a login flow through a free proxy from a public list. A week later, the test account was being used by someone else. Fix: never send credentials through free proxies; use a provider's trial or a small paid balance instead. See free proxies risks.

The great test on the wrong target

A buyer tested three providers against a public IP echo service, picked the fastest, and then found it blocked constantly on the real target. Fix: test on the real target, with enough samples, measuring content success rather than connection success. See how to test proxies before buying.

How the proxy market actually works

Understanding the supply chain helps you make sense of prices and claims.

Networks, resellers and white labels

A relatively small number of companies operate their own large residential networks. Many more resell access to those networks under their own brand, sometimes with added features, sometimes simply with a markup. White-label arrangements let a reseller present a network as their own. None of this is inherently bad. Resellers can offer better prices for small buyers, better support in a niche, or a friendlier dashboard. But it means two "different" providers can share an upstream pool, so a pool problem can hit both at once. See proxy resellers and marketplaces and how to become a proxy reseller.

Where residential IPs come from

Residential peers usually come from SDKs embedded in apps, from bandwidth-sharing apps that pay users, or from hardware programmes. The best providers make consent explicit and separate from other terms. The worst have used malware. See how proxy providers source IPs.

Where ISP and datacenter IPs come from

ISP proxies use IP ranges registered to consumer or business ISPs, announced from servers in datacenters, often through arrangements with smaller ISPs. Datacenter proxies use ordinary hosting and cloud IP ranges, which are cheap and plentiful.

Why prices keep falling

Competition, larger networks and better infrastructure have pushed per-GB residential prices down sharply over recent years. At the same time, targets have become stricter, so buyers need higher-trust IPs for more jobs. The net effect is that most buyers spend more in total even as unit prices fall. The answer is the same as always: measure cost per success and fetch less.

Total cost of ownership: three worked examples

Price lists compare apples with oranges: per GB, per IP, per port, per request. The only way to compare fairly is to model your workload. Here are three realistic examples using rough market prices. Your numbers will differ; the method is what matters.

Example 1: Monitoring 20,000 product pages a day

An e-commerce team tracks prices on two large retailers with bot protection.

• HTML-only via HTTP client: about 150 KB per page after compression.
• Daily volume: 20,000 pages × 150 KB = 3 GB per day, or roughly 90 GB a month.
• Retries and overhead: add 20%, so about 108 GB.
• Residential at a mid-market per-GB rate: around $250 to $350 a month at typical volume pricing.

Now the same job with a headless browser that loads every asset: 2.5 MB per page means 1.5 TB a month, which is ten to fifteen times the cost. Blocking images, fonts and media might bring it down to 600 KB per page, still four times the HTML-only cost. The lesson: the way you fetch matters more than which provider you pick. See price monitoring proxies and Geonode for price monitoring.

Example 2: Managing 40 social accounts

A marketing agency runs 40 client accounts, each needing one consistent IP.

• ISP proxies: 40 dedicated IPs at a low single-digit price each per month. Bandwidth is usually unmetered, so heavy use doesn't cost more.
• Residential sticky sessions: possible, but sessions eventually rotate, and per-GB costs add up with media-heavy feeds.
• Mobile proxies: the most trusted option, but 40 dedicated mobile ports would cost many times more.

ISP proxies win clearly here. The extra spend that makes sense is on a good antidetect browser and on keeping each profile's location, timezone and language consistent. See social media management proxies and Geonode ISP proxies.

Example 3: A research crawl of 2 million public pages

A data team collects public pages from thousands of small sites for a one-off analysis.

• Most targets are lenient, so rotating datacenter proxies work for the majority.
• A minority block datacenter IPs; route those through residential.
• Total: perhaps 80% of requests on datacenter (cheap per GB) and 20% on residential.

A split setup like this often costs a fraction of sending everything through residential. The engineering cost is a simple routing rule: try datacenter first, and move a domain to residential if its success rate drops below a threshold. See rotating datacenter proxies and Geonode datacenter proxies.

What these examples have in common

1. Fetch less. HTML instead of full pages, APIs instead of HTML, and no repeated fetches of unchanged pages.
2. Match the proxy type to the target, not to the whole project.
3. Pay for persistence only when you need it. Static IPs for accounts, rotating pools for everything else.
4. Measure cost per success, and revisit monthly.

Proxies, unblockers, scraping APIs or datasets?

Buying proxies isn't the only way to get web data any more. The four options sit on a spectrum from "you do everything" to "you just receive data".

Many teams use several. They run raw proxies for their high-volume core targets, use a scraping API for a few awkward sites, and buy a dataset for something like company firmographics. Providers increasingly bundle these. Geonode, for instance, sells raw proxies alongside a Scraper API that returns pages as HTML or Markdown with optional JavaScript rendering, which makes it straightforward to compare the two on the same target. See scraping API vs proxies, web unblocker proxies and the Geonode Scraper API.

A simple decision rule

• If you scrape fewer than a few thousand pages a month from hard targets, a scraping API is usually cheaper once you count your time.
• If you scrape millions of pages, raw proxies are usually cheaper per page, and the engineering pays for itself.
• If a target changes its defences often, an unblocker or API saves maintenance.
• If the data is commodity data, check whether a dataset exists before you build anything.

The best proxies by region

Where you need IPs changes which providers and types make sense.

United States

The deepest market for every proxy type. Residential coverage is excellent, state and city targeting is widely available, and ISP proxies from several US ISPs are easy to buy. US East (Virginia, New York) and US West (California) are the common server hubs for latency-sensitive work. See US proxies.

United Kingdom

Good residential coverage, smaller ISP proxy supply than the US, and prices that can be higher for static IPs. London is the hub for low-latency work. UK sneaker sites and many UK retailers expect UK IPs. See UK proxies.

European Union

Coverage is strong in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy, and thinner in smaller markets. GDPR makes scraping personal data a legal question, not just a technical one, so check what you collect. Frankfurt and Amsterdam are the usual server locations. See are proxies legal?.

Asia-Pacific

Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, India and Indonesia are generally well covered by residential pools. China is a special case: mainland targets and connectivity are complicated, and many providers restrict it. ISP proxy supply varies widely by country.

Latin America

Brazil and Mexico have good residential coverage; smaller countries can be thin. If you need precise cities, test them. Mobile traffic forms a large share of the region's internet use, so mobile proxies can be especially effective there.

Middle East and Africa

Coverage is improving but uneven. Test specific countries before buying. Pricing is usually the same per GB as elsewhere, but you may get fewer distinct IPs.

Wherever you need IPs, geo-targeting options matter. Providers such as Geonode let you target residential traffic by country, state, city or ASN, which is what you need for local search and ad checks. See geo-targeted proxies and Geonode geo-targeting for local SEO.

Security and account hygiene for proxy buyers

Proxies carry your traffic, your credentials and sometimes your customers' data. A few habits keep you safe.

Protect your proxy credentials

• Store credentials in environment variables or a secrets manager, never in code you commit.
• Use sub-users for each project, server or teammate, with traffic limits.
• Rotate passwords after a team member leaves or a laptop is lost.
• Prefer IP whitelisting on servers with fixed IPs, and remove old IPs from the whitelist when you decommission servers.

Use HTTPS end to end

When you browse an HTTPS site through an HTTP proxy, your client opens an encrypted tunnel to the website with the CONNECT method, so the proxy can see the domain but not the page content. Never disable certificate verification to "fix" a proxy error. If a proxy asks you to install a root certificate, you're giving it the power to read everything, which is only appropriate for tools you control. See HTTP vs HTTPS proxies.

Avoid free proxies for anything sensitive

Free public proxies can log, modify or inject content into your traffic. Never log into accounts or send payment details through them. See free proxies risks.

Check for leaks

In browser setups, DNS and WebRTC can reveal your real IP even when the proxy works. Test with a leak checker after every setup change. See DNS leaks and proxies and WebRTC leaks and proxies.

Keep payment and account records

Pay with methods that offer buyer protection, keep invoices, and enable two-factor authentication on your provider dashboard. A compromised dashboard can drain prepaid balances or expose your usage history.

A legal and ethical checklist

Using proxies is legal in most countries. What you do with them is subject to the same laws as anything else. Before any project, run through this list. It's not legal advice, and if the stakes are high you should talk to a lawyer.

1. Is the data public? Collecting information behind a login, a paywall or technical barriers you've bypassed carries more risk than collecting publicly available pages.
2. Does it include personal data? Names, emails, photos, profiles and anything that identifies a person bring in data protection law such as GDPR and CCPA. Collect the minimum, have a lawful basis, and secure what you store.
3. What do the site's terms say? Breaching terms of service is usually a civil matter rather than a criminal one, but it can lead to account bans, blocked access and, in some cases, lawsuits.
4. Are you respecting the site's capacity? Rate-limit your requests so you never degrade a site for real users. See rate limiting and proxies.
5. Have you checked robots.txt and opt-outs, especially for AI training data, where many sites now state explicit preferences? See AI training data proxies.
6. Is the proxy network itself legitimate? Using a network built on infected devices is an ethical problem and potentially a legal one. See how proxy providers source IPs.
7. Are you avoiding prohibited uses? Fraud, credential stuffing, spam, harassment and evading bans for abusive behaviour are off-limits, and reputable providers will close your account for them.

For more, read are proxies legal? and ethical web scraping.

How websites detect proxies, and what that means for buying

You'll choose better proxies if you understand what they're up against. Modern bot protection scores every visitor on many signals at once. The IP is one of them, and often not the most important.

IP-level signals

• IP type. Databases classify IP ranges as hosting, residential, mobile or business. Hosting ranges start with a lower trust score. This is the main reason residential and ISP proxies exist.
• IP reputation. Abuse reports, spam listings and previous bot activity follow an IP and often its whole subnet. See IP reputation and proxies.
• Request rate per IP. Too many requests from one address, or too many from one subnet, trigger rate limits.
• Geography. An IP that appears in a different country from the account's history, or that jumps between cities, raises flags.

Connection-level signals

• TLS fingerprint. The way your client negotiates encryption identifies the software. A Python script and a real Chrome browser look very different, whatever IP they use.
• HTTP/2 fingerprint. Similar idea, based on settings and header order.
• Proxy headers. Badly configured proxies add headers such as Via or X-Forwarded-For that announce the proxy. Commercial proxies normally don't. See proxy anonymity levels.
• Latency patterns. Some systems compare network timing with the claimed location.

Browser-level signals

• Fingerprint consistency. Timezone, language, screen size, fonts, WebGL and dozens of other attributes should make sense together and match the IP location.
• Automation flags. Headless browsers expose signs of automation unless they're configured carefully.
• Leaks. WebRTC and DNS can reveal the real IP behind the proxy.

Behaviour-level signals

• Navigation patterns. Real users arrive from somewhere, scroll, pause and click. Scripts often jump straight to deep URLs at machine speed.
• Session history. Cookies and account history build trust over time; brand-new sessions have none.

What this means for buying

1. Don't overpay for IP trust you can't use. If your client has a bot-like TLS fingerprint, an expensive mobile proxy won't fix it. Fix the client first, then pick the cheapest proxy that works.
2. Buy the location you need, consistently. Geo-targeting is only useful if the rest of your setup matches.
3. Spread load. A large, diverse pool helps you stay under per-IP and per-subnet limits.
4. Use sticky sessions for anything stateful, so the IP doesn't change under an established session.

Read browser fingerprinting and proxies, avoiding IP bans when scraping and CAPTCHAs and proxies for the details.

Proxy setup at a glance for popular tools

Whichever provider you choose, these are the patterns you'll use. Credentials and targeting syntax differ by provider; your dashboard's endpoint generator will give you the exact strings.

For Geonode-specific walkthroughs, see Geonode with Python, Geonode with Puppeteer, Geonode with Playwright and Geonode with cURL.

Proxies for personal privacy

Most of this guide is about business use, but people also ask about the best proxies for everyday privacy. The honest answer is that a proxy is usually the wrong tool for that job.

• A VPN encrypts all of a device's traffic to the VPN server and is designed to protect privacy on untrusted networks. A typical proxy handles one app's traffic and doesn't add encryption beyond what the website already uses. See proxy vs VPN.
• Free proxies are actively harmful for privacy, because the operator can see and alter unencrypted traffic.
• Paid proxies make sense for specific tasks, such as checking how a website looks from another country, testing your own app's geo features, or separating work identities in different browser profiles.

If what you want is general privacy, use a reputable VPN and good browser hygiene. If you want to see the web from specific locations for work, a residential proxy with a browser extension is the simplest setup. Geonode offers a Chrome extension that switches proxies in one click; see using Geonode in Chrome.

A 30-day plan for buying your first proxies

If you're starting from zero, here's a calm, step-by-step month that ends with a setup you can trust.

Days 1 to 3: Define and estimate

• Write the job description from the testing section: targets, locations, volume, sessions, method.
• Load a sample of target pages in a browser with developer tools open and note the transfer size.
• Estimate monthly GB or IPs needed, with 20% overhead.

Days 4 to 7: Shortlist and buy small

• Pick two or three providers that offer the type you need, using the criteria in this guide and our proxy provider checklist.
• Buy the smallest sensible amount from each, preferring trials or non-expiring traffic.

Days 8 to 14: Test properly

• Run the test harness against each target, interleaving providers.
• Collect at least 500 requests per target per provider.
• Calculate success rate, median and p95 latency, bytes per success and cost per 1,000 successes.

Days 15 to 21: Build the real setup

• Pick a primary provider and a backup.
• Move proxy settings into configuration, with a helper that builds proxy URLs.
• Add success-rate logging per domain, retries with new IPs, and resource blocking in browsers.
• Route easy domains to cheaper proxy types.

Days 22 to 30: Run, watch, adjust

• Run production volume and watch the numbers daily for the first week.
• Fix the biggest cost driver you find, which is usually page weight or retries.
• Set a calendar reminder for a monthly cost review and a quarterly re-test.

At the end of the month you'll have something most proxy buyers never get: real data about what works on your targets and what it costs. That's worth more than any "best proxies" list, including this one.

Building a proxy stack that lasts

Most buyers start with one provider and one proxy type. Over time, the setups that work best look more like a small stack.

Layer 1: A primary residential provider

This handles protected targets and anything that needs geo-targeting. Choose it with the testing method above. Keep a balance large enough for normal operations and small enough that a pool problem doesn't strand a lot of money.

Layer 2: Static IPs for persistent identities

ISP proxies for accounts, logged-in scraping and checkouts. Buy them per need, not in bulk "just in case".

Layer 3: Cheap capacity for easy targets

Datacenter proxies for everything that doesn't need residential trust. Route by domain, and promote a domain to residential only when its success rate drops.

Layer 4: A backup provider

A second residential provider with a small balance, tested monthly. When your primary has an outage or a pool degrades on a key target, you switch in minutes instead of days. Non-expiring traffic is ideal for this role, because the balance doesn't disappear while you're not using it. Geonode can work as either the primary or the backup in this layer.

Layer 5: An API for the awkward targets

A scraping API or unblocker for the handful of sites that cost more engineering time than they're worth. See the Geonode Scraper API.

Glue: routing, monitoring and budgets

Tie the layers together with a small routing table (domain to proxy type), success-rate monitoring per domain, and a monthly cost review. Our cheap proxies guide includes a 15-minute monthly review you can copy.

The best proxies for specific jobs, in more detail

The use-case table earlier gives a one-line answer for each job. Here's a little more detail on the jobs we're asked about most.

Web scraping at scale

Rotating residential for protected sites, datacenter for lenient ones, sticky sessions for pagination and logins, and an HTML-first approach to keep bandwidth down. Rotate on blocks rather than blindly on every request when a site uses session cookies. Read best proxies for web scraping, web scraping proxies and Geonode for web scraping.

Headless browsers

Browsers need consistent identities, so use sticky sessions of 5 to 30 minutes, one per browser context, and match timezone and language to the exit. Block heavy assets to save bandwidth. Read Puppeteer proxies, Playwright proxies and Selenium proxies.

Sneaker releases

ISP proxies for checkout, rotating residential for raffles, cheap datacenter for monitors, and a bot server near the retailer. Read sneaker proxies and best proxies for sneaker bots.

SEO and SERP data

Search engines are quick to challenge datacenter IPs. Use rotating residential with city targeting for local results, or a SERP API for volume. Keep request rates modest. Read best proxies for SEO rank tracking, Google SERP scraping proxies and Geonode for SEO rank tracking.

Ad verification and affiliate checks

Residential proxies targeted to the exact city or region, with fresh browser profiles, so you see what real users see. Read ad verification proxies and Geonode for ad verification.

Social media

One static IP per account (ISP or mobile), stable fingerprints, and slow, human-like activity. Read best proxies for social media, Instagram proxies and TikTok proxies.

Travel and pricing intelligence

Prices vary by location, device and session, so use residential proxies in each market, hold sessions for search flows, and repeat checks to account for variation. Read travel fare aggregation proxies and Geonode for travel fares.

AI agents and LLM tools

Agents that browse the web need reliable access and clean output. A scraping API or MCP server that returns Markdown is often simpler than raw proxies, while large data collection for training is a proxy and compliance project. Read AI training data proxies and Geonode for AI agents.

A proxy buyer's glossary

The terms that come up most when comparing providers. For the full list, see the proxy glossary.

Final recommendations

If you remember nothing else from this guide:

1. Start from the job, not the provider. Write down targets, locations, volume, sessions and method.
2. Pick the proxy type for each target. Residential for protected sites, ISP for persistent identities, datacenter for easy targets, mobile only when the others fail.
3. Test on your real targets with enough samples, and compare cost per successful request.
4. Fetch less to spend less: HTML over full pages, APIs over HTML, no repeated fetches.
5. Keep a backup provider warm with a small, non-expiring balance.
6. Check sourcing and security, because a cheap proxy from a botnet is a liability.
7. Review costs monthly.

If you'd like a flexible place to start, Geonode lets you buy residential bandwidth by the GB without expiry and add ISP, datacenter or API products as you go. Whatever you choose, follow the testing method above and let your own numbers make the final decision. Then go deeper with the guides to residential proxies, cheap proxies, sneaker proxies and Puppeteer proxies.

More buying questions, answered

These are the questions readers send us most often after reading this guide. The short FAQ at the end covers the basics; these go a little further.

Should I buy from one provider or several?

Start with one primary provider so you can learn its tools and build reliable numbers, and add a second as a backup as soon as proxies matter to your business. Outages, pool degradation on a specific target and sudden policy changes all happen. Two providers turn a crisis into a configuration change. Keep the backup small and test it monthly.

Is a bigger pool always better?

No. A bigger live pool in your target countries helps you spread requests and avoid repeats, but beyond a certain point it makes no difference to your job. A smaller pool of clean, well-managed IPs regularly beats a larger pool of abused ones. Measure unique IPs per 1,000 requests and success rate on your targets rather than trusting the headline. See proxy pool size.

How many proxies do I need?

It depends on the type. With rotating residential proxies, you don't buy IPs at all; you buy bandwidth and the gateway gives you as many IPs as you need. With static proxies (ISP or datacenter), plan around one IP per persistent identity (an account, a checkout task, a browser profile), plus enough IPs to keep per-IP request rates well under the target's limits for stateless scraping. For sneakers, see how many proxies for a sneaker bot.

Do I need city-level targeting?

Only if what you collect changes by city. Local search results, map listings, local ads, delivery availability and some prices do. Most scraping doesn't. City targeting can draw from a smaller pool and sometimes costs more, so use country or state targeting unless you've confirmed you need cities. See geo-targeted proxies.

What's the difference between residential and ISP proxies again?

Residential proxies route through real consumer devices and usually rotate across a large pool. ISP proxies are static IPs registered to consumer ISPs but hosted on servers, so they're fast and permanent but come from a smaller set of ranges. Use residential for variety and trust at scale, ISP for stable identities and speed. See ISP vs residential proxies.

Can I use the same proxies for scraping and for accounts?

You can, but you shouldn't. Scraping traffic is bursty and more likely to get IPs flagged on a target. Accounts need clean, consistent IPs. Keep separate pools, or at least separate sub-users and IP lists, for each kind of work.

Are datacenter proxies dead?

Not at all. They're blocked on the most protected sites, but a huge share of the web doesn't block them, and they're the fastest and cheapest option by a wide margin. Many efficient operations send most of their traffic through datacenter proxies and only the hard targets through residential. See datacenter proxies.

Should I trust "best proxy" review sites?

Use them for shortlisting, not for deciding. Check whether they disclose affiliate relationships (we disclose ours with Geonode on every page), whether they explain their testing method, and whether they mention weaknesses. Then test on your own targets.

How do I know if a provider's IPs are ethically sourced?

Ask how residential peers are recruited, how consent is collected, whether peers are paid, and whether the provider checks its own customers. Look for specific, published answers. Providers built on infected devices tend to be vague, cheap and short-lived. See ethically sourced proxies.

When does an unlimited plan make sense?

When your residential traffic is high, steady and predictable enough that a flat monthly price beats your per-GB bill, and when the plan's speed or concurrency limits fit your workload. Model it with real usage data from a few months of per-GB billing before you switch.

What if my proxies work in testing but fail in production?

The usual causes are scale (you're now hitting per-IP or per-subnet limits), time of day (the pool behaves differently at production hours), or a difference between the test setup and production code (headers, fingerprints, sessions). Compare production logs with your test logs, reduce per-IP rates, and check that production sessions and fingerprints match what you tested. See common proxy errors.

How often should I re-test providers?

Run a small monthly check on your key targets and a full comparison every quarter or before any large purchase or renewal.

The one-page proxy buying checklist

Copy this list into your notes before you buy.

The job

• Targets listed by domain and page type
• Locations needed, and how precise
• Requests per day and peak per minute
• Session needs: none, short sticky, long sticky, permanent
• Fetch method: HTTP client, browser, or both

The proxy type

• Residential for protected targets and geo-targeting
• ISP for persistent identities and speed
• Datacenter for lenient targets and volume
• Mobile only after residential and ISP have failed
• API or unblocker for targets not worth the engineering

The provider

• Live coverage in your locations
• Targeting options you actually need
• Session length and reliability
• Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
• Traffic expiry terms
• Sourcing statement and customer checks
• Sub-users, statistics, API, whitelisting
• Support channels and hours
• Refund or trial policy

The test

• At least 500 requests per target per provider
• Interleaved runs at production hours
• Success rate measured on content, not status code
• Median and p95 latency
• Bytes per success and cost per 1,000 successes
• Geo accuracy and IP diversity spot checks

After buying

• Credentials in configuration and a secrets store
• Per-domain success monitoring
• Retries with new IPs, capped
• Resource blocking in browsers
• Monthly cost review and quarterly re-test
• A backup provider with a small balance

Use the checklist with any provider. If you want a flexible one to test first, Geonode's pay-as-you-go residential proxies are a low-commitment way to run the test section on your real targets.

How we keep this guide current

The proxy market changes quickly: providers rebrand, merge, add products and change prices, and targets change their defences. We revisit this guide regularly and update it when something changes the advice, not just the numbers. Here's what we check each time:

• Product lineups and billing models for the providers we mention, including whether traffic expires and how sessions and targeting work.
• Typical price ranges for each proxy type, based on public pricing pages at entry and volume tiers.
• Sourcing and enforcement news, such as botnet takedowns and regulator warnings that affect residential networks.
• Tooling changes in Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, Node.js and Python that affect how proxies are configured.
• Reader reports about what's working and failing on common targets.

What we don't do is run a public leaderboard of providers. Results vary so much by target, location and time that a single ranking would mislead more people than it helped. Instead, we give you the method to produce your own ranking for your own job, which is the only one that matters.

If you spot something out of date, or a provider changes something important, let us know through the contact details on our FAQ page. And if you're ready to start testing, our companion guides on how to test proxies before buying and the proxy provider checklist turn this guide into a practical plan.

One last piece of advice: write your results down. A simple spreadsheet with the date, provider, target, sample size, success rate, latency and cost per 1,000 successes becomes more valuable every month you keep it. When a renewal comes up, a salesperson offers a discount, or a target suddenly starts blocking you, that history lets you decide in minutes instead of guessing. It also makes it easy to show a manager or client exactly why you chose the proxies you did, and what it would cost to change.

How to read any "best proxies" ranking

Search for "best proxies" and you will find dozens of ranked lists, each with a different winner. That is not because most of them are dishonest (although some are). It is because "best" is a weighted score, and every list uses different weights without telling you what they are. Once you know how to read a ranking, you can turn any list into something useful for your own decision instead of being steered by it.

Find the hidden weights

Every "best proxy" list rewards some qualities over others. A list written for sneaker buyers rewards raw speed to Shopify and footsite servers, ISP inventory and release-day stability. A list written for data teams rewards pool size, geo coverage, success rate on protected sites and per-GB price. A list written for privacy-minded individuals rewards ease of setup, apps and a monthly price under the cost of a streaming subscription. None of these lists is wrong. They are just answering different questions.

Before you trust a ranking, ask three things:

1. Who is the article written for? If the examples are all about scraping and you manage social accounts, the winner probably isn't your best proxy.
2. What was measured? "We tested 30 providers" means very little unless the page says which sites, from where, with how many requests, and what counted as a success.
3. What did the author get paid for? Affiliate links are normal (we use them for Geonode and Webshare, and we say so on every page). What matters is whether the article still tells you when a partner is the wrong pick.

Separate the categories

The most useful rankings split the best proxies by category: best residential proxies, best ISP proxies, best datacenter proxies, best mobile proxies, and sometimes best scraping API. A single overall winner hides the fact that a provider can be excellent at datacenter proxies and mediocre at residential, or the reverse. If a list crowns one provider as the best proxy service for everything, read it as the author's favourite all-rounder, not as a universal answer.

Our own category picks live in their own guides: best residential proxies, best ISP proxies, best datacenter proxies, best mobile proxies and best SOCKS5 proxies. This page pulls them together.

Check the date and the method

The proxy market moves quickly. Providers change prices, cut or add products, lose access to IP sources and gain new ones. A "best proxies" list from two years ago can be badly out of date. Look for a visible update date and, ideally, a short note about what changed. We keep a "How we keep this guide current" section at the end of this page for exactly that reason.

A good method section answers: which targets were tested, how many requests per provider, from which locations, with which proxy type and session setting, over what period, and how success was defined (a 200 status is not enough; the page must contain the real content). If a ranking can't answer those questions, use it only to build a shortlist.

Use rankings to build a shortlist, never to decide

The right way to use any list of the best proxy providers, including ours, is to pull three to five names that fit your proxy type and budget, then test them yourself on your real targets. A one-week test with small balances costs less than a single month on the wrong plan. The rest of this guide gives you the tools to run that test properly.

The best proxies scorecard: a weighted method you can reuse

When we evaluate the best proxies for a particular job, we use a simple weighted scorecard. You can copy it, change the weights to match your work, and score each provider on your shortlist after a short test. It turns a fuzzy question ("which is the best proxy?") into a number you can defend to a manager or a client.

The ten criteria

Choosing the weights

Weights should add up to 100. Here are three sample weightings for common jobs. Treat them as starting points.

Multiply each score by its weight, add the results, and divide by 100. A provider scoring 4.2 against one scoring 3.6 is a meaningful difference. Scores within 0.2 of each other are a tie, and you should break the tie on billing flexibility and support, because those decide how painful the next problem will be.

Why the scorecard beats gut feeling

Without a scorecard, buyers tend to over-weight whatever they noticed last: a slow dashboard, a friendly sales call, a low headline price. The scorecard forces you to consider the boring criteria (stability, support, billing) that usually decide whether a provider is still your best proxy option six months later. It also gives you a record. When you re-test next quarter, you can see exactly what changed.

A worked example

Say a small analytics team wants to monitor prices on 40 retail sites in the United States and the United Kingdom, about 300,000 requests a month. They shortlist three residential providers and test each for five days with a small balance.

Provider A wins, but not by a mile, and not because it was cheapest. It won on success rate and coverage, which drive the real cost of this job because every failed request has to be retried. That is the most important lesson of the scorecard: the best proxies are usually the ones with the lowest cost per successful result, not the lowest price per GB.

A decision tree for finding your best proxy type

If you are still unsure which kind of proxy you need, work through these questions in order. Most buyers reach an answer in under a minute, and it saves you from comparing providers on the wrong product.

Question 1: Does the target block datacenter IPs?

Try a few hundred requests through cheap datacenter proxies. If more than about 95% succeed and return real content, stop here: datacenter proxies are your best proxies for this target, and anything more expensive is wasted money. If success is poor, or you see CAPTCHAs and block pages, continue. See datacenter proxies and cheap datacenter proxies.

Question 2: Do you need the same IP for a long time?

If you log in to accounts, run checkouts, keep browser profiles, or need a consistent identity for days or weeks, you need static IPs. Static ISP proxies are usually the best proxy choice here because they combine residential-looking IP ranges with server speed and permanence. Continue to question 3 only if you don't need persistence. See ISP proxies and static residential proxies.

Question 3: Do you need many different IPs, or specific locations?

If you are collecting lots of pages from a protected site, or you need results as seen from many countries, states or cities, rotating residential proxies are almost always the best proxies for the job. They give you access to a large pool, geo-targeting, and the trust that comes from real consumer connections. See rotating residential proxies and geo-targeted proxies.

Question 4: Is the target a mobile app or extremely strict?

Some platforms, especially mobile-first social apps, treat carrier IPs more gently than anything else, because many real users share each carrier IP through carrier-grade NAT. If residential proxies still struggle, or you are managing high-value accounts on a mobile platform, mobile proxies are the best proxy type, even though they cost the most. See mobile proxies and mobile vs residential proxies.

Question 5: Would you rather not manage proxies at all?

If the target is very hard and your team doesn't want to maintain retries, headers, browser fingerprints and CAPTCHA handling, a web unblocker or scraping API may be cheaper overall than even the best proxies. You pay per successful page and the provider handles everything else. See web unblockers and scraping API vs proxies.

The short version

The hidden costs that decide which proxies are really the best

Headline prices are the least reliable way to compare proxy providers. Two plans with the same price per GB can differ in real cost by a factor of three once you count everything that actually happens in production. The best proxies are the ones whose total cost is lowest for your results, so it pays to know where the hidden costs live.

Retries

Every failed request costs you bandwidth, time and compute, and you still need the data. If Provider X costs $3 per GB with a 95% success rate and Provider Y costs $2 per GB with a 70% success rate, Provider Y needs roughly 1.43 requests per success against 1.05 for Provider X. Add the extra browser time, the extra CAPTCHA risk and the extra engineering, and the "cheap" plan is often the expensive one. Always compare cost per successful result.

Page weight

On per-GB plans, the size of each page matters as much as the price per GB. A modern product page loaded in a full headless browser can easily weigh several megabytes once images, fonts, scripts and tracking pixels load. The same data fetched through a JSON endpoint might weigh a few kilobytes. Blocking images, fonts and media in your browser automation, or calling an API endpoint directly where that's allowed, can cut your proxy bill by 70% or more without changing provider. See proxy bandwidth pricing explained.

Expiring traffic

Many residential plans are monthly subscriptions where unused gigabytes vanish at the end of the cycle. If your usage is uneven, you pay for traffic you never use. Plans where purchased bandwidth doesn't expire, such as Geonode residential, can be cheaper in practice even when the per-GB price looks similar, because nothing is wasted. See pay-as-you-go proxies.

Minimum commitments and overage rates

Watch for plans that look cheap only at a large monthly commitment, and for overage rates that are much higher than the plan rate. If your volume might spike, check what happens when you go over: some providers simply bill the same rate, while others charge a premium or cut you off until the next cycle.

Engineering time

A provider with poor documentation, flaky authentication or an awkward session format can cost a developer several days. At typical engineering rates, that is often more than a year of price difference between two providers. Good docs, clean examples for your language, and a responsive support team are part of what makes the best proxy service, even if they never appear on a pricing page.

Account risk

For account work, the cost of a bad IP isn't bandwidth. It's a banned account, a lost ad budget or a client relationship. Paying more for clean static ISP or mobile IPs is almost always cheaper than replacing accounts. See IP reputation and proxies.

A simple total cost formula

For scraping work, we use this rough formula when comparing the best proxy plans:

cost per 1,000 successful pages =
  (price per GB x average MB per page / 1000 x 1000 / success rate)
  + (compute cost per 1,000 attempts / success rate)
  + (engineering hours per month x hourly rate / thousands of successful pages)

You don't need precise numbers. Rough estimates are enough to show which plan is cheapest once retries and engineering are included, and the result is often different from what the pricing page suggests.

The best proxies by industry

Use cases tell you the proxy type; industries tell you the constraints. A retailer and a travel company may both "monitor prices", but they face different targets, different legal considerations, different volumes and different tolerance for bad data. This section walks through the best proxies for the industries that buy them most, with the setup we would start from in each.

E-commerce and retail

Retail teams use proxies to track competitor prices, stock levels, promotions, shipping costs and marketplace listings. Targets range from small Shopify stores, which are usually lenient, to giant marketplaces with serious bot protection.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential for the big marketplaces, rotating datacenter for long-tail stores.
• Geo needs: country-level for most pricing; postcode or city for delivery fees and availability.
• Session setting: rotate per request for listing pages; sticky for a few minutes when a page needs a cart or location cookie.
• Watch out for: pages that show different prices to logged-in users, and personalised prices that depend on browsing history. Clear cookies between runs.

See best proxies for e-commerce scraping, price monitoring proxies and Amazon scraping proxies.

Travel and hospitality

Airlines, hotels and online travel agencies change prices by point of sale, device and date, and many of them run strong bot protection. The best proxy setup here is all about precise location and clean sessions.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential with country targeting, plus sticky sessions of 5 to 15 minutes for multi-step searches.
• Geo needs: the point of sale matters. A fare searched from Germany can differ from the same fare searched from the United States.
• Volume pattern: spiky. Searches cluster around certain dates and routes, so plans with non-expiring bandwidth suit this industry well.
• Watch out for: search flows that tie a session to the first IP; a mid-flow IP change can reset the search.

See travel fare aggregation proxies, Geonode for travel fares and Geonode for hotel rates.

Real estate

Listing portals, rental sites and public property records are popular data sources for investors, agents and analysts. Portals tend to be moderately protected and often rate-limit aggressively by IP.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential for the major portals, datacenter for public records and smaller agency sites.
• Geo needs: usually country-level, sometimes state-level where portals localise results.
• Session setting: rotating, with modest concurrency per target.
• Watch out for: terms of service and personal data in listings. Collect what you need for analysis and avoid storing personal details of individuals.

See Geonode for real estate data and Webshare for real estate data.

Finance and alternative data

Hedge funds, fintechs and research firms use proxies to collect alternative data: job postings, product prices, app rankings, web traffic signals, reviews and public filings. Accuracy and consistency matter more than anything, because the data feeds models.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential for consistency across protected sites, with ISP proxies for sources that need logins.
• Key requirement: consistent collection over months. A provider whose success rate drifts can introduce bias into a dataset, which is worse than a gap you can see.
• Compliance: expect your legal team to ask about IP sourcing, provider KYC and data handling. Choose providers with clear documentation. See ethically sourced proxies.

See Geonode for financial data and Geonode for job market data.

Marketing agencies

Agencies manage social accounts, check ads in different regions, track local search rankings and research competitors for many clients at once. Their proxy needs are broad and their biggest risk is cross-contamination between clients.

• Best proxies to start with: static ISP proxies for account work (one IP per account or per client), rotating residential for research and ad checks.
• Organisation: use sub-users or separate proxy lists per client so you can track cost and isolate problems.
• Tools: an antidetect browser with one profile per account, each bound to its own proxy.

See Geonode for marketing agencies, Webshare vs Geonode for agencies and social media management proxies.

SEO and search

SEO teams track rankings, check local packs, audit SERP features and research keywords. Search engines are among the most protected targets on the web, and results vary by location down to the neighbourhood.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential with city targeting for local SEO; country targeting for national rankings.
• Volume: usually moderate but steady, which suits either per-GB plans or a SERP API.
• Alternative: many teams find a SERP API cheaper than running their own search scraping, because the provider handles CAPTCHAs and parsing.

See SEO proxies, best proxies for SEO rank tracking and Google SERP scraping proxies.

Ad tech and ad verification

Ad verification teams check that ads appear where they should, to the right audience, without fraud or malicious redirects. They need to see ads exactly as a real user in a given location and on a given device would see them.

• Best proxies to start with: residential and mobile proxies with precise geo-targeting; datacenter IPs are often served different ads or none at all.
• Session setting: sticky for the length of a page view and its redirect chain.
• Device realism: pair mobile proxies with mobile user agents and viewport sizes when checking mobile ads.

See ad verification proxies and Geonode for ad verification.

Brand protection

Brand protection teams hunt counterfeit listings, unauthorised resellers, trademark abuse and phishing pages. Counterfeiters often geo-block or cloak their pages, showing harmless content to anything that looks like an investigator.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential with wide country coverage, so you can view pages as a normal shopper in each market.
• Extras: mobile proxies for app-store and social marketplace checks.
• Evidence: capture screenshots and page source with timestamps and the exit country, because takedown requests need proof.

See brand protection proxies and Geonode for brand protection.

Cybersecurity and threat intelligence

Security teams use proxies to investigate phishing kits, check how malicious sites behave in different regions, test their own geo-restrictions, and collect threat intelligence without exposing corporate IP ranges.

• Best proxies to start with: residential for realistic visitor views, datacenter for bulk, low-risk collection.
• Isolation: run investigations from isolated virtual machines or containers. A proxy hides your IP, but it does not protect your machine from malicious content.
• Authorisation: only test systems you own or are authorised to assess.

See Geonode for cybersecurity research and Webshare for cybersecurity research.

Academic research

Researchers collect public web data to study online markets, misinformation, prices, platform behaviour and more. Budgets are small, timelines are long, and ethics boards ask detailed questions.

• Best proxies to start with: datacenter for lenient sources, a small residential balance for protected ones. Non-expiring bandwidth suits grant-funded projects well.
• Ethics: document your collection method, rate limits and data handling. Respect robots.txt where your protocol requires it, and avoid collecting personal data you don't need.

See Geonode for academic research and ethical web scraping.

AI and machine learning

AI teams collect large, diverse datasets for training and evaluation, and increasingly run agents that browse the web in real time. Volume can be enormous, and the cost per GB dominates the budget.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating datacenter for the bulk of the open web, rotating residential for protected sources, and unlimited residential plans once volume is very high and steady.
• Agents: browsing agents need sticky sessions so that a multi-step task stays on one IP.
• Data governance: keep records of what was collected, from where and when, for licensing and compliance reviews.

See AI training data proxies, Geonode for AI agents and Webshare vs Geonode for AI training data.

Recruitment and HR tech

Job boards and company career pages are a rich data source for labour market analysis, salary benchmarking and lead generation. Major job boards are well protected; company career pages usually are not.

• Best proxies to start with: rotating residential for the big boards, datacenter for career pages and applicant tracking system pages.
• Geo needs: country and sometimes city, because listings are localised.

See Webshare for job market data and Geonode for B2B lead research.

Media monitoring and news

PR teams, publishers and analysts track news coverage, paywalled headlines, regional editions and social mentions. Most news sites are lenient, but regional editions require local IPs.

• Best proxies to start with: datacenter for most news sites, residential with country targeting for regional editions and stricter publishers.

See Geonode for news monitoring and Geonode for review monitoring.

Software and QA teams

Developers and testers use proxies to check localisation, geo-restrictions, CDN behaviour, pricing pages and payment flows in different countries.

• Best proxies to start with: residential with country targeting for realistic tests, static ISP for repeatable test runs from a fixed IP.
• Automation: integrate the proxy into your Playwright or Selenium test suite so that each test runs from the right country.

See Geonode for localization testing, Webshare for localization testing and Geonode for website monitoring.

Industry summary table

The best proxies for your tools and code

Your tooling changes which proxies work best. A plain HTTP client sends small requests and can rotate on every call. A headless browser sends dozens of requests per page and needs a stable IP for the whole page load. A no-code automation platform may only accept a single proxy URL. Here is how we would pick the best proxies for the most common stacks, with minimal setup examples you can adapt.

Python requests and httpx

For simple HTTP scraping in Python, a rotating gateway is usually the best proxy setup. You point every request at a single host and port, and the provider assigns a new exit IP per request (or per session, if you add a session ID to the username).

import requests

proxy = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000"
proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}

r = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/ip", proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
print(r.json())

• Best proxy type: rotating datacenter for lenient sites, rotating residential for protected ones.
• Tips: set a timeout on every request, retry on connection errors and on 403 and 429 responses with a short backoff, and reuse a Session object for keep-alive when you are using sticky IPs.

See Python requests proxies, Geonode with Python and Webshare with Python.

Scrapy

Scrapy is built for scale, and the best proxies for it are gateways that handle rotation for you, so your spider doesn't have to manage a list of IPs. Set the proxy per request in a downloader middleware or in meta.

# settings.py
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    "scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware": 750,
}

# in your spider
yield scrapy.Request(url, meta={"proxy": "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000"})

• Best proxy type: rotating residential or datacenter, depending on the target.
• Tips: tune CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN and DOWNLOAD_DELAY per target rather than globally, and use AutoThrottle so that slow responses reduce your request rate automatically.

See Scrapy proxies, Geonode with Scrapy and Webshare with Scrapy.

Puppeteer

Headless Chrome loads every resource on a page, so each page view can be dozens of requests. The best proxies for Puppeteer keep one IP for the whole page (a sticky session) and are fast enough that pages don't time out.

const puppeteer = require("puppeteer");

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  args: ["--proxy-server=http://gateway.example.com:8000"],
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.authenticate({ username: "USERNAME", password: "PASSWORD" });
await page.goto("https://httpbin.org/ip");

• Best proxy type: sticky residential sessions for protected sites, ISP proxies for logged-in automation.
• Tips: block images, fonts and media with request interception to cut bandwidth; launch one browser per proxy if you need different IPs at the same time.

See Puppeteer proxies, Puppeteer proxy authentication, Puppeteer proxy per page and Puppeteer rotating proxies.

Playwright

Playwright makes proxies easier than Puppeteer because you can set a proxy, with credentials, per browser context. That means one browser process can run several isolated sessions, each on its own IP.

const { chromium } = require("playwright");

const browser = await chromium.launch();
const context = await browser.newContext({
  proxy: { server: "http://gateway.example.com:8000", username: "USERNAME", password: "PASSWORD" },
});
const page = await context.newPage();
await page.goto("https://httpbin.org/ip");

• Best proxy type: sticky residential or ISP, one per context.
• Tips: give each context its own session ID in the proxy username so each context gets a different but stable IP.

See Playwright proxies, Geonode with Playwright and Webshare with Playwright.

Selenium

Selenium is common in QA teams and older scraping projects. Chrome doesn't accept proxy credentials on the command line, so the best proxy setup for Selenium is often IP allowlisting (no username and password) or a helper extension or library that handles authentication.

from selenium import webdriver

opts = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
opts.add_argument("--proxy-server=http://gateway.example.com:8000")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=opts)
driver.get("https://httpbin.org/ip")

• Best proxy type: ISP or sticky residential with IP allowlisting.
• Tips: allowlist your server's IP in the provider dashboard so you don't need credentials in the browser at all. See proxy authentication methods.

See Selenium proxies, Geonode with Selenium and Webshare with Selenium.

Node.js with axios or fetch

For HTTP scraping in Node, use an agent library such as https-proxy-agent or the undici ProxyAgent.

import { ProxyAgent, fetch } from "undici";

const dispatcher = new ProxyAgent("http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000");
const res = await fetch("https://httpbin.org/ip", { dispatcher });
console.log(await res.json());

• Best proxy type: rotating gateway, as for Python.

See Node.js axios proxies, Geonode with Node.js and Webshare with Node.js.

curl for quick tests

curl is the fastest way to check that a proxy works and to see your exit IP.

curl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000 https://httpbin.org/ip
curl --socks5-hostname USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:1080 https://httpbin.org/ip

Use --socks5-hostname rather than --socks5 so that DNS is resolved through the proxy. See curl proxy and how to check if a proxy works.

Antidetect browsers

Antidetect browsers such as AdsPower, Dolphin{anty}, GoLogin, Multilogin, MoreLogin and Incogniton create separate browser profiles with their own fingerprints. Each profile should have its own proxy.

• Best proxy type: static ISP for long-lived accounts, mobile for the strictest mobile-first platforms, sticky residential for short-lived profiles.
• Rule: one profile, one IP, one account. Match the proxy location to the profile's time zone and language settings.

See antidetect browser proxies, Geonode with antidetect browsers and Webshare with antidetect browsers.

No-code and automation platforms

Tools such as n8n, Make and Zapier-style workflows often accept a single proxy URL per HTTP node. A rotating gateway is the best proxy option here because one URL gives you many IPs.

• Best proxy type: rotating residential or datacenter gateway.
• Tips: keep credentials in the platform's credential store, not hard-coded in nodes.

See Geonode with n8n and Webshare for automation tools.

AI agents and LLM tools

Browsing agents and LLM tool calls fetch pages on demand, often several in a row for one task. They need sticky sessions so that a multi-step task stays on one IP, and good success rates because an agent that hits a block page wastes tokens and time.

• Best proxy type: sticky residential, or a scraping API that returns clean content.
• Tips: cap the number of pages an agent can fetch per task, and log the exit IP with each fetch for debugging.

See Geonode for AI agents and Webshare vs Geonode for AI agents.

Stack summary

Session strategy: getting the most from the best proxies

Even the best proxies perform badly with the wrong session strategy. A rotating IP in the middle of a login flow looks suspicious; a sticky IP used for 50,000 requests gets rate-limited. Matching session behaviour to the job is one of the cheapest ways to raise your success rate.

Rotate per request when pages are independent

If each request stands alone (a product page, a search result, an article), rotate on every request. This spreads load across the pool and keeps per-IP request rates low. It is the default on most rotating gateways.

Use short sticky sessions for multi-step pages

If a page needs a cookie set on a previous request (a location selector, a consent banner, a pagination token), keep the same IP for a few minutes. Most providers let you set this by adding a session ID to the username, for example USERNAME-session-abc123. Change the session ID to get a new IP.

Use long sticky sessions or static IPs for identities

Logged-in accounts, checkouts and browser profiles should stay on the same IP for as long as possible. Sticky residential sessions can drop when the underlying device goes offline, so for anything that must last days, static ISP proxies are the best proxy choice.

Pace each IP, not just the whole job

Websites rate-limit by IP, by account, by fingerprint and by behaviour. Even with thousands of IPs, sending 30 requests a second to one site from a single session will get it flagged. Set a per-IP pace that looks like a human (a few requests a minute for account work; more for public pages on lenient sites) and scale by adding sessions, not by speeding up each one. See rate limiting and proxies.

Retire bad IPs quickly

When an IP returns a block page or a CAPTCHA, stop using it for that target and move on. With a rotating gateway, change the session ID. With a static list, put the IP on a cool-down for a few hours. Don't keep hammering a flagged IP; it only makes the reputation worse.

See sticky vs rotating sessions, proxy rotation strategies and what is proxy rotation.

The best proxies for the most popular target sites

Some websites come up in almost every proxy buyer's plans. Each has its own defences, and the best proxy setup for one can fail on another. Here is what we would start with for each, with the usual caution: read and respect each platform's terms, collect only public data you are allowed to use, and never use proxies to evade bans for abusive behaviour.

Amazon and large marketplaces

Amazon serves enormous traffic and has well-tuned bot detection. Datacenter IPs are often served CAPTCHAs quickly, while residential IPs with sensible pacing see far fewer.

• Best proxies: rotating residential with country targeting to match the marketplace (US IPs for amazon.com, UK IPs for amazon.co.uk, and so on).
• Settings: rotate per request for product pages; set a delivery location cookie once per sticky session if you need local prices or availability.
• Bandwidth: product pages are heavy. Block images and scripts you don't need, or use a scraping API that returns structured data.

See Amazon scraping proxies, Geonode for Amazon scraping, Webshare for Amazon data and Webshare vs Geonode for Amazon.

Google Search and Maps

Google is one of the hardest targets on the web for automated queries. It responds to suspicious traffic with CAPTCHAs, unusual traffic pages and degraded results.

• Best proxies: rotating residential with city targeting for local results, and a very low query rate per IP.
• Alternative: a SERP API is often the best value, because it handles CAPTCHAs and returns parsed results.
• Accuracy: set the language and location parameters as well as the IP location; a mismatch can skew results.

See Google SERP scraping proxies, Geonode for local SEO and SEO proxies.

Instagram

Instagram is mobile-first and treats IPs differently depending on whether they look like phones, homes or servers. Account trust builds slowly and is lost quickly.

• Best proxies: mobile proxies for high-value accounts, static ISP proxies for managed brand accounts, one IP per account.
• Settings: keep each account on the same IP and location; avoid jumping countries.
• Behaviour: warm up new accounts slowly. No proxy can save an account that behaves like a bot.

See best proxies for Instagram, Instagram proxies, Geonode for Instagram and Webshare for Instagram.

TikTok

TikTok localises its feed and content heavily by region, which makes location-matched IPs essential for marketers researching trends or managing regional brand accounts.

• Best proxies: mobile or residential in the target country, with static ISP for persistent brand accounts.
• Settings: match device language, time zone and SIM region (on real devices) to the proxy country.

See best proxies for TikTok, TikTok proxies and Geonode for TikTok.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is strict about automation and its terms limit scraping heavily. Most legitimate proxy use here is about managing a small number of real accounts from consistent locations, for example for a remote team or an agency.

• Best proxies: static ISP or residential IPs in the account holder's real country, one per account.
• Caution: automated data collection from LinkedIn carries legal and account risk. Read the terms carefully.

See LinkedIn proxies and Geonode for LinkedIn.

Facebook and Meta ads

Advertisers and agencies use proxies to manage ad accounts and check how ads appear in different regions. Meta is sensitive to logins from many locations and to shared IPs across accounts.

• Best proxies: static ISP proxies, one per ad account or business profile, in the account's home country.
• Ad checks: residential or mobile proxies in each target region to view ads as a local user.

See Facebook proxies and Geonode for Facebook ads.

Reddit

Reddit is valuable for brand monitoring and research. Public data is available through official channels with limits; heavy unofficial scraping attracts rate limits.

• Best proxies: residential with modest pacing for public pages; static ISP for managed accounts.

See Reddit proxies and Geonode for Reddit.

X (Twitter)

X has tightened access to public data and rate-limits logged-out viewing heavily.

• Best proxies: residential for public research at low volume; static ISP for managed accounts.

See Twitter and X proxies.

YouTube

YouTube localises recommendations, trending pages and some search results. Researchers and marketers use proxies to see what different regions are shown.

• Best proxies: residential with country targeting; datacenter often works for metadata at low volume.

See Geonode for YouTube research.

Shopify stores and footsites

For sneaker and limited-release buyers, Shopify stores and footsites (Foot Locker, Champs and others) are the main targets. Speed and release-day stability matter more than anything.

• Best proxies: ISP proxies located close to the store's servers, with residential as a backup when ISP ranges are flagged.
• Settings: one proxy per task, tested shortly before the release.

See Shopify sneaker proxies, footsites proxies, Nike SNKRS proxies, sneaker proxies and best proxies for sneaker bots.

Target summary

How websites score your proxy, and how the best proxies pass

Modern bot protection doesn't just look at your IP. It builds a score from many signals and decides whether to serve the page, a challenge or a block. Understanding those signals explains why the same proxy can work perfectly with one setup and fail with another, and why buying the "best proxies" is only half the job.

Signal 1: IP type and reputation

The site checks whether your IP belongs to a hosting provider, a consumer ISP or a mobile carrier, and whether it has a history of abuse. Datacenter ranges start with a lower trust score on strict sites. Residential and mobile IPs start higher, but individual IPs can still carry bad history. See IP reputation and proxies.

Signal 2: Location consistency

The IP's location is compared with your browser's time zone, language, and sometimes the account's usual location. A German IP with a US English browser set to Pacific time is a mismatch. Fix it by setting the browser or profile to match the proxy.

Signal 3: TLS and HTTP fingerprint

Every HTTP client has a recognisable fingerprint in the way it negotiates TLS and orders its headers. A Python script claiming to be Chrome in its user agent, but with a Python TLS fingerprint, is easy to spot. Use real browsers for strict targets, or HTTP libraries that impersonate browser fingerprints.

Signal 4: Browser fingerprint

Headless browsers expose dozens of properties (canvas, WebGL, fonts, screen size, navigator flags) that can reveal automation. Stealth plugins and antidetect browsers reduce these signals. See Puppeteer stealth proxies and headless browser proxies.

Signal 5: Behaviour

How fast you navigate, whether you scroll and move the mouse, how regular your timing is, and which pages you visit in what order all feed the score. Perfectly regular timing is a strong bot signal. Add jitter and realistic navigation.

Signal 6: Leaks

WebRTC and DNS leaks can reveal your real IP even behind a proxy. Disable or route WebRTC through the proxy, and resolve DNS through the proxy (for example with SOCKS5 and remote DNS). See WebRTC leaks and proxies and DNS leaks and proxies.

What this means for buying

The best proxies give you a good starting score on signal 1 and the location control you need for signal 2. Signals 3 to 6 depend on your tooling and behaviour. If your success rate is poor on every provider you test, the problem is probably not the proxies. Fix the fingerprint and behaviour first, then compare providers again.

Technical details that separate the best proxies from the rest

Two providers can sell "residential proxies" with similar pool sizes and prices and still perform very differently. The differences are usually technical: protocol support, IPv6 handling, authentication options, gateway location, connection limits and how the pool is managed. If you know what to look for, you can spot the best proxies before you spend much money.

Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5

Most proxy traffic uses HTTP proxies, which handle both plain HTTP and HTTPS (through the CONNECT method, so your traffic stays encrypted end to end). SOCKS5 works at a lower level and can carry any TCP traffic, plus UDP on some providers, which matters for some apps, games and non-web tools.

• For web scraping and browsers, HTTP proxies are the best choice. They are universally supported and easy to debug.
• For apps, games, email clients and other non-HTTP tools, SOCKS5 is the best proxy protocol.
• For DNS privacy, SOCKS5 with remote DNS resolution (socks5h) keeps lookups on the proxy side.

The best proxy providers support both on the same plan. See HTTP vs HTTPS proxies, SOCKS5 proxies and SOCKS4 vs SOCKS5.

IPv4 and IPv6

IPv4 addresses are scarce and expensive, which is part of why residential and ISP proxies cost what they do. IPv6 addresses are plentiful and cheap, so IPv6 proxies can be bought in huge quantities for very little. The catch: many websites don't support IPv6 at all, and some treat IPv6 ranges as a single identity because one customer can control billions of addresses.

• Use IPv6 proxies when you have confirmed the target supports IPv6 and doesn't penalise it. Some large platforms do.
• Use IPv4 proxies for everything else. For most buyers, the best proxies are still IPv4.

See IPv4 vs IPv6 proxies and IPv6 proxies.

Authentication

There are two common ways to authenticate: username and password, or IP allowlisting (sometimes called whitelisting). Good providers offer both.

The best proxy services also let you encode settings (country, city, session ID, session duration) into the username, so you can change behaviour per request without touching the dashboard. See proxy authentication methods.

Gateway location and latency

Rotating proxies route your traffic through a gateway server before it reaches the residential exit. If the gateway is on another continent from both you and the target, every request crosses the ocean twice. The best providers run gateways in several regions or use anycast, so your connection goes to the nearest one. Test latency from the server where your code will actually run, not from your laptop.

Connection and thread limits

Some plans cap concurrent connections or threads. For a browser-based scraper running 50 parallel sessions, a 20-thread cap is a hard bottleneck. Check the limit before buying and test at your real concurrency during the trial. See Webshare bandwidth and threads for a worked example of how one provider handles this.

Pool management

Large pools are only useful if the IPs are live, clean and well distributed. Signs of good pool management:

• Few repeated IPs in a sample of 1,000 rotating requests.
• IPs that geolocate to the country you requested, in commercial geolocation databases, not just the provider's own.
• Low share of IPs listed on common blocklists.
• Consistent success rates over a week, not just on day one.

See proxy pool size and how proxy providers source IPs.

Backconnect architecture

Most rotating proxies are "backconnect" proxies: you connect to one endpoint and the provider connects you onward to an exit IP. That makes rotation, geo-targeting and session control simple for you, but it also means the provider's gateway is a single point of failure. The best proxy providers publish a status page and have redundancy. See backconnect proxies.

How to benchmark the best proxies yourself

Reviews and rankings can shortlist providers, but only your own benchmark tells you which are the best proxies for your targets. Here is the benchmark we use. It takes a few hours to set up and a few days to run, and it will save you far more than it costs.

Step 1: Pick representative targets

Choose five to ten URLs that represent your real work: a mix of easy and hard pages, in the countries you care about. Include at least one page you know is strongly protected. If you only test easy pages, every provider will look like the best proxy service.

Step 2: Define success precisely

A 200 status code is not success. Many block pages return 200. Define success as "the response contains a specific piece of real content", such as a product title selector, a price element or a known string. Count CAPTCHAs, block pages, empty responses, timeouts and connection errors separately.

Step 3: Use the same setup for every provider

Same machine, same code, same headers, same browser version, same concurrency, same time of day. Change only the proxy. Otherwise you are benchmarking your setup, not the proxies.

Step 4: Run enough requests

A few dozen requests prove nothing. Aim for at least 500 to 1,000 requests per provider per target type, spread over several days and times. That is enough to see real differences in success rate and to catch providers whose performance degrades.

Step 5: Record the right metrics

Step 6: A minimal benchmark script

This Python sketch measures success rate and latency for a list of URLs through one proxy. Run it once per provider and compare the outputs.

import statistics, time, requests

PROXY = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000"
TARGETS = [("https://example.com/product/1", "Add to cart")]  # (url, text that proves success)
N = 200

ok, times, errors = 0, [], {}
for i in range(N):
    url, marker = TARGETS[i % len(TARGETS)]
    t0 = time.time()
    try:
        r = requests.get(url, proxies={"http": PROXY, "https": PROXY}, timeout=30)
        if marker in r.text:
            ok += 1
            times.append(time.time() - t0)
        else:
            errors[r.status_code] = errors.get(r.status_code, 0) + 1
    except requests.RequestException as e:
        errors[type(e).__name__] = errors.get(type(e).__name__, 0) + 1

print(f"success {ok / N:.1%}")
if times:
    print(f"median {statistics.median(times):.2f}s  p95 {sorted(times)[int(len(times) * 0.95) - 1]:.2f}s")
print("errors", errors)

For browser-based work, use the same idea with Playwright or Puppeteer: load each page, check for the success selector, and record timings.

Step 7: Score and decide

Feed the results into the weighted scorecard earlier on this page. If two providers tie, choose the one with better billing flexibility and support, and keep the runner-up as your backup. See proxy speed test, how to test proxies before buying and Webshare testing proxies.

Troubleshooting: when the best proxies stop working

Even the best proxies have bad days. When your success rate falls, a quick, methodical diagnosis gets you back on track faster than switching providers in a panic. Work through these checks in order.

1. Is it the proxy, or the target?

Send a request through the proxy to a neutral endpoint such as an IP echo service. If that works, the proxy is up and the problem is with the target. If it fails, check your credentials, your allowlist, your balance and the provider's status page.

2. Did the target change?

Websites update their bot protection without notice. If every provider fails on one target at the same time, the target changed. Look at the response: a new CAPTCHA vendor, a new JavaScript challenge or a different block page tells you what to fix.

3. Did your setup change?

A library upgrade, a new browser version, a changed header or a new server IP can all break a working setup. Check what you deployed recently.

4. Are you going too fast?

Volume creep is common. A job that started at 10,000 requests a day slowly becomes 100,000, and per-IP rates rise until the target pushes back. Check per-IP request rates and add sessions or slow down.

5. Is one location or ASN the problem?

Break failures down by exit country and, if your provider exposes it, by ISP or ASN. Sometimes one network is flagged and excluding it fixes everything.

6. Read the error codes

See common proxy errors, avoid IP bans when scraping, CAPTCHAs and proxies and Webshare troubleshooting.

Webshare and Geonode as best proxy picks: where each one wins

We are affiliates of both Webshare and Geonode, and we use both. They come up on this page often because, between them, they cover most of what small and mid-sized buyers need, and because they are good examples of two different approaches to selling proxies. Here is an honest summary of where each is the best proxy pick and where it isn't. Prices and features change, so check each provider's site before buying.

Where Webshare is the best proxy pick

• Learning and small tests. Webshare's free plan (10 shared datacenter proxies and 1 GB of bandwidth a month at the time of writing, no card required) is one of the easiest ways to see how proxies behave before spending anything. See Webshare free proxies.
• Cheap datacenter proxy lists. If your targets don't block datacenter IPs, Webshare's configurable lists (choose the number of proxies, bandwidth, threads and locations) are among the lowest-cost ways to get a lot of IPs. See Webshare datacenter proxies.
• Static IPs per account. Webshare's static residential (ISP) proxies give each account or profile a fixed IP from a consumer ISP range. See Webshare static residential proxies.
• Developers who like proxy lists. You can download a list for your own rotation, or use the backbone endpoint for rotation and sessions. See Webshare backbone vs direct connection and Webshare API guide.

Where Geonode is the best proxy pick

• Residential traffic that doesn't expire. Geonode residential bandwidth carries over rather than vanishing each month, which suits uneven or project-based work. See Geonode proxies review.
• One account, several proxy types. Residential, unlimited residential, ISP and rotating datacenter under one login make mixed setups easy to manage. See Geonode ISP proxies and Geonode datacenter proxies.
• High, steady residential volume. Geonode's unlimited residential plans are priced by speed tier rather than by GB, which can beat per-GB billing once volume is large and constant. See Geonode unlimited residential.
• Teams that might prefer an API. Geonode's scraper and search APIs let you try paying per result instead of per GB. See Geonode scraper API.

Where neither is the best choice

• Very large enterprises with strict procurement, dedicated account management, custom contracts and very large guaranteed pools may prefer enterprise providers. See enterprise proxy providers and Bright Data vs Oxylabs.
• Dedicated mobile proxy needs at scale are often better served by mobile specialists. See mobile proxy providers compared.

Using both

Many buyers end up with both: Webshare datacenter lists for cheap, lenient targets and monitors, and Geonode residential for protected targets and geo-targeted research. That split often gives the lowest total cost, because each request goes through the cheapest proxy that works for it. See Webshare vs Geonode: using both, Webshare vs Geonode pricing and Webshare vs Geonode residential proxies.

Where Rayobyte is the best proxy pick

We are also a Rayobyte affiliate. Rayobyte is a US provider that started in 2015 as Blazing SEO and now sells every major proxy type in both static and rotating forms. Here is where it stands out, and where it doesn't. Check its site for current prices before you buy.

Where Rayobyte wins

• Precise residential targeting. Premium Residential reaches 190+ countries with state, city, ZIP code, ASN and even device OS targeting. See Rayobyte geo-targeting.
• Residential at volume. Pay-as-you-go traffic falls from $3.50 per GB to $0.70 per GB at 1 TB, and Scale Residential costs around a cent per GB for untargeted crawls by verified businesses. See Rayobyte pricing explained.
• The widest range of products. Static and rotating ISP, static, semi-dedicated and rotating datacenter, US mobile, HTTP/3 proxies, a Scraping API, a Web Unblocker and hosted stealth browsers. See choosing the right Rayobyte product.
• Documented ethics. Opt-in residential IPs with a visible opt-out, blocked high-risk targets and EWDCI certification. See how Rayobyte sources residential IPs.

Where Rayobyte isn't the cheapest

• Small residential purchases cost more per GB than Geonode's.
• Static ISP IPs cost more per IP than Webshare's or Geonode's.
• Residential sticky sessions top out at 120 minutes.

For a full comparison of all three of our partners, read Rayobyte vs Geonode vs Webshare, and for head-to-heads see Rayobyte vs Geonode and Rayobyte vs Webshare.

The best proxies at every scale of operation

The best proxies for a hobbyist running one script are not the best proxies for a company sending a billion requests a month. As you grow, the priorities shift from "cheapest way to start" to "most reliable at volume" to "best terms and support". Here is how the right choice changes as you scale.

Stage 1: Experimenting (under $20 a month)

You are learning, testing an idea or running a small personal project. You need something that works, costs almost nothing, and doesn't lock you in.

• Best proxies: a free plan, or a small pay-as-you-go residential balance.
• Priorities: easy setup, good docs, no commitment.
• Avoid: free public proxy lists (insecure and unreliable) and annual plans.

See free proxies risks, Webshare free proxies and best proxies for beginners.

Stage 2: First real project ($20 to $200 a month)

You have a working tool and real targets. Now success rate and cost per result start to matter.

• Best proxies: the cheapest type that works on each target, often a mix of datacenter and residential.
• Priorities: success rate on your targets, usage stats, non-expiring or pay-as-you-go traffic.
• Do now: run the benchmark from this page on two or three providers.

See cheap proxies and pay-as-you-go proxies.

Stage 3: Production ($200 to $2,000 a month)

The proxies support revenue or a client deliverable. Downtime now costs money.

• Best proxies: a primary provider chosen by benchmark, plus a small backup provider.
• Priorities: stability, support response time, sub-users for cost tracking, API access.
• Do now: set up monitoring of success rate per target and alerts when it drops.

See proxy provider support and SLA.

Stage 4: Scale ($2,000 to $20,000 a month)

Proxies are a significant line item. Small percentage savings are worth real money.

• Best proxies: negotiated volume pricing, unlimited plans where volume is steady, and routing logic that sends each request to the cheapest working proxy type.
• Priorities: effective cost per successful request, dedicated support, contract terms.
• Do now: review page weight and retry logic, which often save more than renegotiating price.

See unlimited bandwidth proxies and proxy pricing guide.

Stage 5: Enterprise (over $20,000 a month)

Procurement, legal and security teams are involved. Contracts, compliance documentation and service levels matter as much as performance.

• Best proxies: two or more providers under contract, with clear SLAs and documented IP sourcing.
• Priorities: compliance, KYC, data processing agreements, account management, redundancy.

See enterprise proxy providers and ethically sourced proxies.

Free proxies vs the best paid proxies

Free proxies are tempting, and for learning they have a place. But for anything that matters, the gap between free proxy lists and the best paid proxies is enormous. It's worth being clear about why.

Public free proxy lists

Public lists of open proxies are scraped from the internet. Many are misconfigured servers, compromised devices or honeypots. They are slow, die within hours, and are already blocked on most sites because everyone uses them.

• Security: an open proxy can read and modify unencrypted traffic and log everything you send. Never log in to anything through one.
• Reliability: typical success rates are very low, and lists go stale in hours.
• Ethics: some open proxies are devices whose owners don't know they are running a proxy.

Free plans from real providers

Free plans from legitimate providers are a different thing. They give you a small number of real proxies with authentication, so only you can use them, and a clear set of terms. They are the best way to learn and test. Webshare's free plan is a well-known example.

When to move to paid

Move to paid proxies as soon as you need any of these: more than a handful of IPs, residential or mobile IPs, geo-targeting below country level, reliable uptime, or support. The best paid proxies cost a few dollars to start, which is less than the time you'll lose to free lists in a single afternoon.

Trials, refunds and how to test the best proxies cheaply

The best way to find your best proxy provider is to test, and the best way to test is cheaply. Most providers offer some combination of free trials, small starter plans, pay-as-you-go balances or money-back guarantees. Knowing how each works helps you test three providers for less than the cost of one wrong monthly plan.

Types of trial

• Free trial bandwidth. A small amount of free traffic, sometimes after a short verification. Great for checking that setup works; usually too small for a real benchmark.
• Free plans. Ongoing free access to a few proxies. Good for learning and for testing lenient targets.
• Small paid starter plans. A few dollars for a small amount of traffic or a few IPs. Often the best value for a proper test, because you get the real product with no artificial limits.
• Pay-as-you-go balances. Buy only what you need for the test. If the traffic doesn't expire, anything left over is still useful if the provider wins.
• Money-back guarantees. Useful insurance, but read the conditions: many cap the bandwidth you can have used to stay eligible.

Read the refund policy before you buy

Common conditions include a short window (often a few days), a maximum amount of bandwidth used, and exclusions for certain products. If you plan to rely on a refund, keep your test within the limits. See proxy free trials and Webshare billing and refunds.

A cheap three-provider test plan

1. Pick three providers that fit your proxy type and budget.
2. Buy the smallest real plan or balance each one sells, ideally with non-expiring traffic.
3. Run the benchmark from this page on each, at the same time, for three to five days.
4. Score them with the weighted scorecard.
5. Scale up with the winner, and keep the runner-up's leftover balance as your backup.

Total cost is usually well under a single month of a mid-sized plan, and you finish with real data instead of a guess.

Twelve real-world scenarios: choosing the best proxies step by step

Principles are easier to apply when you see them in action. These twelve scenarios are composites of the kinds of setups readers describe to us. Each one walks through the questions, the choice and the reasoning, so you can find the scenario closest to yours and adapt it.

Scenario 1: A solo developer building a price tracker

Situation: One developer wants to track prices on 15 online stores for a side project, checking each product twice a day. Roughly 20,000 requests a month. Budget under $15 a month.

Questions: Do the stores block datacenter IPs? A quick test shows 12 of the 15 stores work fine through datacenter proxies; three return block pages.

Choice: A small datacenter proxy list for the 12 easy stores, and a small pay-as-you-go residential balance for the three hard ones.

Why it's the best proxy setup: Sending everything through residential would cost several times more for no benefit on the easy stores. Splitting by target keeps the total under budget. A Webshare datacenter list plus a Geonode residential balance is one way to do this.

Scenario 2: An agency managing 40 client social accounts

Situation: A small agency runs Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts for 15 clients, 40 accounts in total, from one office.

Questions: Do the accounts need persistent IPs? Yes, every account logs in daily. Do they need specific locations? Yes, each client's home country.

Choice: 40 static ISP proxies, one per account, in each client's country, used inside an antidetect browser with one profile per account.

Why: Logging 40 accounts in from one office IP links them all. If one is flagged, the others are at risk. One IP per account isolates each client. See social media management proxies.

Scenario 3: A data team scraping a heavily protected marketplace

Situation: A five-person data team needs 2 million product pages a month from a major marketplace in three countries.

Questions: Datacenter fails completely. Residential works at about 92% with a headless browser, but bandwidth is high: around 2 MB per page.

Choice: Rotating residential with country targeting, plus aggressive resource blocking to cut page weight to about 300 KB. They also test the marketplace's internal JSON endpoints for listing pages.

Why: Cutting page weight by 85% saved more than any price negotiation could. At 2 million pages, 2 MB per page is about 4,000 GB; 300 KB per page is about 600 GB. See proxy bandwidth pricing explained.

Scenario 4: A local SEO consultant tracking rankings in 30 cities

Situation: A consultant tracks 200 keywords for 10 clients across 30 cities, weekly.

Questions: Do results vary by city? Yes, strongly, because of local packs. Is volume high? About 60,000 searches a month.

Choice: They compare city-targeted residential proxies with a SERP API. The SERP API wins on total cost once CAPTCHAs, retries and parsing time are counted.

Why: For search engines, the best proxy solution is sometimes not a proxy. See scraping API vs proxies and best proxies for SEO rank tracking.

Scenario 5: A sneaker group preparing for a major release

Situation: A small cook group runs 50 tasks on a Shopify release and 20 on a footsite.

Questions: Do they need speed? Yes. Persistence? Through the checkout. Location? Close to the store's servers.

Choice: 70 ISP proxies in the US, tested the day before release, with a small residential balance as a backup for any ISP ranges that turn out to be flagged.

Why: ISP proxies give residential-looking IPs at datacenter speed, which is exactly what release day needs. See ISP proxies for sneakers and how many proxies for a sneaker bot.

Scenario 6: A university research project on online prices

Situation: A research group studies grocery prices across five countries for 18 months, on a fixed grant.

Questions: Is volume steady? Yes, but small, about 30 GB a month. Is consistency critical? Yes, gaps and drift bias the dataset.

Choice: Residential with non-expiring bandwidth, bought in larger blocks when grant money is available, plus documented collection methods for the ethics board.

Why: Non-expiring traffic matches grant funding cycles. The best proxies here are the ones that will still behave the same way in month 18. See Geonode for academic research and Webshare for academic research.

Scenario 7: A startup building an AI browsing agent

Situation: A startup's agent visits websites on behalf of users to answer questions. Traffic is unpredictable and each task loads 3 to 10 pages.

Questions: Does each task need a stable IP? Yes. Is the target list known? No, it's the whole web.

Choice: Sticky residential sessions, one per task, with a fallback to a scraping API for sites that block even residential traffic.

Why: Agents need consistency within a task and broad compatibility across the web. See Geonode for AI agents.

Scenario 8: A QA team testing a checkout in 12 countries

Situation: A QA team needs to verify that pricing, currency, tax and payment options display correctly in 12 countries before every release.

Questions: Do they need persistence? Within a test run. Realism? Yes, payment providers check location.

Choice: Residential proxies with country targeting, integrated into their Playwright test suite with one context per country.

Why: Playwright's per-context proxy makes this clean. See Geonode for localization testing and Playwright proxies.

Scenario 9: A brand protection analyst hunting counterfeits

Situation: One analyst checks marketplaces and social shops in 20 countries for counterfeit listings.

Questions: Do sellers cloak pages? Yes, some show different content to suspected investigators.

Choice: Rotating residential with wide country coverage, plus a few mobile proxies for app-based marketplaces. Every finding is captured with a screenshot, timestamp and exit country.

Why: Cloaked pages only reveal themselves to IPs that look like ordinary shoppers. See brand protection proxies.

Scenario 10: A privacy-minded individual

Situation: Someone wants to keep their home IP private while browsing, and occasionally check how websites look from another country.

Questions: Do they need many IPs? No. Do they need apps for every device? Yes.

Choice: A reputable VPN for everyday privacy, plus a single residential or ISP proxy in a browser profile for the occasional location check.

Why: For everyday personal privacy, a VPN is usually the better tool. The best proxy for an individual is often just one clean IP in a browser extension. See proxy vs VPN and browser proxy settings.

Scenario 11: A hotel revenue manager monitoring competitor rates

Situation: A hotel group checks competitor rates on booking sites for 50 properties, daily, for 90 future dates.

Questions: Do rates vary by point of sale? Yes. Do searches need several steps? Yes.

Choice: Residential with country targeting and 10-minute sticky sessions per search.

Why: Mid-search IP changes reset the search on many booking sites. See Geonode for hotel rates.

Scenario 12: A growing scraping business with mixed targets

Situation: A company scrapes 300 sites for clients, from easy blogs to tough marketplaces, about 50 million requests a month.

Questions: Is one proxy type right for all? No. Is cost significant? Yes, it's the largest line item after salaries.

Choice: A routing layer that tries datacenter first for each site, promotes a site to residential if success falls below 95%, and uses an unlimited residential plan for the steadiest heavy targets. Two providers for redundancy.

Why: At this scale, the best proxies are a system, not a product. Routing each request to the cheapest proxy that works can halve the bill. See unlimited bandwidth proxies and proxy rotation strategies.

What the scenarios have in common

• Nobody chose a provider first. They chose a proxy type from the job, then a provider from a test.
• Mixed setups were common. The best proxies for a team are often two or three products.
• The biggest savings came from setup changes (page weight, routing, session strategy), not from price.
• Persistence and location were decided by the target, not by preference.

Myths about the best proxies

The proxy market is full of half-truths repeated by forums, sellers and review sites. Believing them leads to overspending, poor results or both. Here are the most common myths we hear, and what is actually true.

Myth: "Residential proxies are always the best proxies"

Residential proxies are the most versatile, but for lenient targets they are slower and several times more expensive than datacenter proxies with no gain in success rate. The best proxy type is the cheapest one that works on your target.

Myth: "The biggest pool is the best proxy network"

Pool size claims are often counted over a month or longer and include IPs that are offline most of the time. What matters is how many clean, live IPs you get in your target locations right now. A smaller, well-managed pool can outperform a larger one.

Myth: "Expensive proxies are always better"

Price reflects proxy type, brand, support and sales costs as much as quality. Some mid-priced providers beat premium brands on specific targets. Test before assuming.

Myth: "Unlimited means unlimited"

Unlimited plans are usually unlimited bandwidth within a speed or thread limit, sometimes with fair-use terms. They can be excellent value at steady high volume, but read the limits. See unlimited bandwidth proxies.

Myth: "Elite proxies make you undetectable"

"Elite" (high-anonymity) means the proxy doesn't add headers revealing that you use a proxy. It doesn't hide your fingerprint, your behaviour or the IP's type. Detection is about much more than headers. See proxy anonymity levels.

Myth: "If I get blocked, the proxies are bad"

Blocks are often caused by fingerprints, request rates, header mistakes or behaviour. Test the same code with two or three providers. If all of them fail, fix your setup before switching provider.

Myth: "Dedicated proxies are always worth the premium"

Dedicated IPs matter for account work where you need to control an IP's history. For rotating scraping across a large pool, shared access is normal and fine. See dedicated proxies and shared proxies.

Myth: "Proxies are illegal" or "Proxies make anything legal"

Using a proxy is legal in most countries. What you do through it is governed by the same laws, contracts and terms as without one. A proxy doesn't make unauthorised access, fraud or abusive scraping legal. See are proxies legal.

Myth: "Mobile proxies can't be banned"

Carrier IPs are shared by many users, so sites are cautious about banning them, but they still rate-limit and block when behaviour is clearly automated. Mobile proxies raise your trust score; they don't make you invisible.

Myth: "One best proxy provider does everything"

Every provider has strengths and weaknesses across proxy types, regions and targets. Many experienced buyers use two or three. Pick the best proxies for each job, not one brand for everything.

Running the best proxies in production

Buying the best proxies is the start. Keeping them performing well, inside budget and without surprises, is an operational job. Teams that treat proxies as infrastructure (monitored, budgeted, documented) get far more from the same providers than teams that treat them as a credit card purchase. Here is the operational playbook we recommend.

Monitor success rate per target

A single overall success rate hides problems. A provider can be at 97% overall while one critical target has fallen to 60%. Track success rate, response time and bandwidth per target, per proxy type and per provider, ideally per hour.

• Log every request with: timestamp, target domain, proxy provider, proxy type, exit country, session ID, status, success flag, response size and duration.
• Build a simple dashboard or daily report from those logs.
• Alert when a target's success rate falls more than a few points below its seven-day average.

Budget by job, not by provider

Use sub-users, separate credentials or tags so that every request is attributed to a job or client. Then you can answer the question "what does this job cost us per month?" and spot jobs whose cost has crept up. Many providers support sub-users with their own traffic limits, which also stops one runaway job from draining the whole balance.

Set spending limits

Runaway loops happen. A bug that retries forever can burn through a month's bandwidth in hours. Set hard caps where your provider allows them, alert on unusual daily usage, and add a circuit breaker in your code that stops a job after a certain number of consecutive failures.

Keep a backup provider warm

The best proxies still have outages. Keep a second provider configured, with a small balance, and send a little traffic through it every day so you know it works. When the primary has trouble, switching is a configuration change, not a scramble.

Abstract the proxy in your code

Don't hard-code a provider's gateway and username format throughout your codebase. Put proxy configuration in one place (a config file or a small proxy service) with a common interface: "give me a session in country X, sticky for Y minutes, of type Z". Then switching or mixing providers is easy.

def proxy_url(provider, country="us", session=None, kind="residential"):
    cfg = PROVIDERS[provider][kind]
    user = cfg["user_format"].format(user=cfg["user"], country=country, session=session or "")
    return f"http://{user}:{cfg['password']}@{cfg['host']}:{cfg['port']}"

Re-test quarterly

Providers change. Pools grow and shrink, targets update their defences, prices move. Every quarter, re-run your benchmark on your current provider and at least one alternative. It's the only way to know you still have the best proxies for your work, and it gives you leverage in price conversations.

Document the setup

Write down which provider, proxy type, geo and session settings each job uses, and why. When the person who set it up leaves or is on holiday, someone else needs to be able to fix it at 2 a.m.

Security and governance for proxy buyers

Proxies sit in the middle of your traffic and are paid for with company money, so they deserve the same care as any other infrastructure. A few simple practices prevent most problems.

Protect credentials

• Store proxy credentials in a secrets manager or environment variables, never in code repositories.
• Use separate sub-users per job or team, so that a leaked credential can be revoked without breaking everything.
• Rotate passwords when staff leave.
• Prefer IP allowlisting for fixed servers, combined with credentials where the provider supports both.

Keep sensitive traffic off shared proxies

A proxy provider can see the destination of your traffic, and with plain HTTP, the content. Always use HTTPS for anything sensitive. Avoid sending internal credentials or personal data through third-party proxies unless your security team has approved the provider.

Vet the provider

For business use, ask every provider on your shortlist:

1. How are residential and mobile IPs sourced, and is consent documented?
2. What KYC do you perform on customers?
3. What logs do you keep about customer traffic, and for how long?
4. Where is the company based, and which laws govern the contract?
5. Do you offer a data processing agreement?
6. Is there a status page and an incident history?

The best proxy providers answer these clearly and quickly. Vague answers are a warning sign. See proxy provider red flags and proxy provider checklist.

Write an acceptable use policy

If several people in your organisation use proxies, write a short policy: which jobs are allowed, which targets are off limits, how fast you may collect, what data you may store, and who approves new uses. It protects the company and gives staff a clear answer when they're unsure.

Keep legal in the loop

Web data collection sits in a complex area of contract law, privacy law and computer misuse law that differs by country. Have counsel review significant projects, especially anything involving personal data, logged-in access or a target that has told you to stop. See are proxies legal and ethical web scraping.

The best proxies by country and region, in more depth

Location coverage is where providers differ most, and the best proxy provider for the United States can be mediocre in Southeast Asia or Africa. If you work across many markets, check coverage country by country rather than trusting a global pool number.

United States

The US has the deepest proxy coverage of any country for every proxy type. Most providers offer state targeting and many offer city targeting. ISP proxies are widely available, often in major data center hubs such as Ashburn, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

• Best proxies: almost any reputable provider has good US residential coverage. Choose on price, ISP locations and session options.
• Tip: for sneaker and checkout work, choose ISP proxies close to the store's hosting region.

See US proxies.

United Kingdom

Strong residential and ISP coverage, with city targeting for London and other large cities on many providers.

• Best proxies: residential for research and ads; ISP for accounts.

See UK proxies.

Western Europe

Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy are well covered by residential pools. ISP coverage is good in the Netherlands and Germany, thinner elsewhere.

• Tip: GDPR applies to personal data you collect about people in the EU, whatever proxy you use.

Eastern Europe

Residential coverage is generally good; mobile proxies are relatively affordable in several countries. Check each country specifically, because coverage varies.

Latin America

Brazil and Mexico have large residential pools; smaller countries can be thin. Mobile traffic is a large share of real users, so mobile proxies can be especially effective for social platforms here.

Asia Pacific

Coverage varies more than anywhere else. India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and Australia are usually available on residential networks, but depth and speed differ widely between providers. Some countries have national firewalls or restrictions that limit what proxies can do.

• Tip: test latency carefully. A gateway in Europe serving an Asian exit IP to reach an Asian site adds a lot of delay.

Middle East and Africa

The thinnest coverage overall. South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are often available, but pools can be small. If these markets matter, make coverage your first criterion when choosing the best proxies, and test before committing.

How to check coverage before buying

1. Ask the provider for live IP counts in your countries, not monthly totals.
2. During a trial, send a few hundred requests per country and count unique IPs and geo accuracy.
3. Check city and state targeting separately; they can draw from much smaller pools.
4. Check whether ISP proxies are available in each country, not just residential.

See geo-targeted proxies, Webshare geo targeting and Webshare vs Geonode geo targeting.

The best proxies for each device and operating system

Proxies work at the network level, so the same proxy can be used from a server, a laptop or a phone. But setup differs, and some devices handle proxy authentication better than others.

Linux servers

The natural home for scrapers and automation. Use username and password in your code, or allowlist the server's IP. Every proxy type and protocol works well here.

Windows

System-wide proxy settings live in Settings, Network and Internet, Proxy, and apply to most apps that respect them. Browsers and many tools can also take their own proxy settings. See proxy setup on Windows and Webshare on Windows, Mac and phones.

macOS

Set a proxy per network service in System Settings, Network, Details, Proxies. As on Windows, some apps ignore system settings and need their own configuration. See proxy setup on Mac.

iPhone and Android

Both support HTTP proxies per Wi-Fi network, with authentication. Mobile data connections generally don't support a manual proxy without an app. For mobile app testing, a proxy app or a configured Wi-Fi network is the usual approach. See proxy setup on iPhone and Android.

Browsers

Browser extensions (including those from providers such as the Webshare Chrome extension and Geonode in Chrome) make it easy to switch proxies per browser profile without changing system settings. See browser proxy settings and proxy PAC files for rules that send only some sites through a proxy.

Head-to-head: which proxy type is the best proxy for each job?

Earlier sections cover each proxy type on its own. Buyers usually face a choice between two, so this section puts them head to head on the comparisons we're asked about most.

Residential vs datacenter

Verdict: Datacenter is the best proxy for any target that allows it; residential is the best proxy for everything else. Always test datacenter first. See residential vs datacenter proxies.

Residential vs ISP

Verdict: Residential for variety, ISP for identity. See ISP vs residential proxies.

Mobile vs residential

Verdict: Residential is the best proxy for most protected targets; pay for mobile only when residential isn't enough. See mobile vs residential proxies and 5G mobile proxies.

Static vs rotating datacenter

Verdict: Static lists for predictable, fixed-IP work; rotating for scraping. See rotating datacenter proxies.

Shared vs dedicated

Verdict: Shared is fine for most scraping; dedicated is the best proxy choice for account work. See shared proxies, private proxies and dedicated proxies.

Proxies vs VPN

Verdict: For business automation, proxies; for personal privacy, usually a VPN. See proxy vs VPN.

Proxies vs scraping APIs

Verdict: Proxies when you have the skills and volume; APIs when time is scarce or targets are very hard. See scraping API vs proxies and Webshare vs Geonode scraping APIs.

How the best proxies have changed, and where they are heading

Understanding how the market got here helps explain why prices and products look the way they do, and what is likely to change in the next couple of years.

From open proxies to commercial networks

In the early web, "proxies" mostly meant open proxies and corporate caching servers. As websites began to block scraping and automation, demand grew for clean, dedicated IPs, and datacenter proxy sellers appeared. For years, datacenter proxies were the best proxies money could buy.

The rise of residential

As bot protection got better at spotting hosting ranges, providers started routing traffic through consumer connections. Early residential networks had serious problems with consent and sourcing. The industry has since moved towards opt-in SDKs, bandwidth-sharing apps that pay users, and published sourcing policies, though standards still vary between providers.

ISP proxies fill the gap

Buyers wanted the trust of residential IPs with the speed and permanence of datacenter servers. ISP proxies, consumer ISP ranges hosted in data centers, became the answer, and are now the default for sneakers and account management.

Unlimited and API products

As volumes grew, per-GB billing became painful for heavy users, and providers introduced unlimited plans priced by speed or threads. At the same time, scraping APIs and web unblockers moved up the stack, selling successful pages instead of raw access.

Trends to watch over the next two years

• Better detection of residential proxies. Bot protection vendors are investing in detecting residential proxy traffic specifically. Clean sourcing and good behaviour will matter more.
• More AI agent traffic. Browsing agents are a fast-growing source of proxy demand, pushing providers towards sticky sessions, low latency and agent-friendly integrations.
• Pressure on sourcing and compliance. Expect more questions from regulators, platforms and enterprise customers about how residential IPs are obtained. Providers with documented consent will be the best proxy choice for larger buyers.
• IPv6 adoption. As more sites support IPv6, cheap IPv6 proxies will become useful for more targets.
• Price compression at the low end. Datacenter and basic residential prices keep falling, while premium and mobile products hold their price.
• Bundles. More providers selling proxies, APIs, datasets and browser tools together.

What this means for your buying

Avoid long commitments in a market that changes this fast, re-test regularly, and favour providers that are open about sourcing. The best proxies today may not be the best proxies next year, and your process should make switching easy.

Ethics: what makes proxies "best" beyond performance

Performance and price are only part of the picture. How a provider sources its IPs and who it sells to affect your legal risk, your reputation and the people whose connections carry your traffic.

Consent-based sourcing

Residential and mobile proxies route your traffic through other people's connections. The best proxy providers obtain clear, informed consent from those people, usually through an app or SDK that explains the arrangement and often pays or rewards them. Ask every provider how consent works, and be wary of anyone who can't explain it.

Customer vetting

Providers that perform KYC on customers and block abusive uses (fraud, credential stuffing, attacks) keep their pools cleaner. That benefits you directly: IPs shared with abusers are the IPs that get blocked.

Responsible collection

Even with the best proxies, collect responsibly:

• Respect rate limits and avoid harming the sites you collect from.
• Collect only the data you need, and be especially careful with personal data.
• Follow applicable laws and contracts, and stop when asked by a site owner unless counsel advises otherwise.
• Don't use proxies to evade bans that were applied for abuse.

See ethically sourced proxies, ethical web scraping and Webshare vs Geonode ethics and sourcing.

Why it matters for buyers

Choosing ethically sourced proxies isn't only about doing the right thing. It reduces the risk that your provider's network is shut down, that your traffic is tied to abuse, or that a client's security review rejects your vendor. In the long run, the best proxies are the ones you can defend.

A quick-reference cheat sheet for best proxy decisions

Bookmark this section. It condenses the whole guide into the decisions you'll make most often.

Picking the proxy type

• Test datacenter first. If it works, it's your best proxy.
• Protected target, many pages: rotating residential.
• Accounts or checkouts: static ISP.
• Strict mobile platforms: mobile.
• Very hard target, little time: scraping API.

Picking the provider

• Shortlist three to five from rankings and recommendations.
• Benchmark on your own targets with small balances.
• Score with weighted criteria; break ties on billing and support.
• Keep the runner-up as backup.

Setting up

• Rotate per request for independent pages.
• Sticky sessions for multi-step flows.
• Static IPs for identities.
• Pace per IP, not just per job.
• Match browser locale and time zone to the proxy location.

Keeping costs down

• Block images, fonts and media.
• Use JSON endpoints where allowed.
• Route each target to the cheapest proxy type that works.
• Prefer non-expiring traffic for uneven usage.
• Compare cost per successful result, not price per GB.

Staying safe

• Never use public free proxies for anything sensitive.
• Store credentials securely; use sub-users.
• Ask about sourcing, KYC and logging.
• Keep legal informed about significant projects.

The best proxies for your role

The same proxy can be the right answer for very different people, but what each person cares about differs. Here is a short guide to the best proxies by role, with what to prioritise and what to ignore.

Developers and data engineers

You care about clean APIs, predictable behaviour, good documentation and the ability to control sessions and geo-targeting from code.

• Prioritise: username-encoded settings, a rotating gateway plus static options, usage APIs, sub-users, clear error codes, examples in your language.
• Ignore: pool-size marketing and glossy dashboards.
• Best proxies to start with: a rotating residential gateway and a cheap datacenter option from the same or a second provider.

See web scraping proxies and best proxies for web scraping.

Marketers and social media managers

You care about account safety, location accuracy and tools that fit your antidetect browser or social scheduling platform.

• Prioritise: static ISP or mobile IPs, one per account, in the right country; integrations with your browser tools; replacements when an IP goes bad.
• Ignore: per-GB residential pricing debates, since account work uses little bandwidth.
• Best proxies to start with: a handful of static ISP proxies matched to your accounts' countries.

See best proxies for social media and Webshare for social media management.

Analysts and researchers

You care about data quality, consistency over time and staying within budget.

• Prioritise: success rate, geo accuracy, non-expiring traffic, documentation for your methods section.
• Ignore: speed beyond "fast enough".
• Best proxies to start with: pay-as-you-go residential for protected sources, datacenter for open ones.

See market research proxies and Webshare for market research.

Founders and managers

You care about total cost, risk, vendor reliability and whether the team can switch if needed.

• Prioritise: cost per successful result, contract terms, sourcing documentation, support, a backup provider.
• Ignore: the cheapest headline price.
• Best proxies to start with: whatever your team's benchmark picks, with a monthly cost report per job.

See how to choose a proxy provider.

Students and hobbyists

You care about learning, low cost and not doing anything risky.

• Prioritise: a free plan or tiny balance, good tutorials, safe defaults.
• Ignore: enterprise features.
• Best proxies to start with: a provider's free plan, such as Webshare's, then a small residential balance when you hit a site that blocks datacenter IPs.

See what is a proxy and how proxies work.

Online store owners

You care about competitor prices, ad checks and seeing your own store as customers in other countries see it.

• Prioritise: country targeting, simple browser setup, low monthly cost.
• Best proxies to start with: a small residential balance with a browser extension, plus a price monitoring tool that supports proxies.

See Geonode for dropshipping research and Geonode for ecommerce marketplaces.

Sneaker and limited-release buyers

You care about speed on release day and IPs that aren't already flagged.

• Prioritise: ISP proxies near store servers, fresh ranges, quick replacements, support during drops.
• Best proxies to start with: ISP proxies for checkout tasks, cheap datacenter for monitors.

See sneaker proxies, sneaker proxy setup guide and sneaker monitor proxies.

Negotiating with proxy providers

Once you spend more than a few hundred dollars a month, prices are often negotiable. The best proxies at the best price usually come from a conversation, not a pricing page.

Know your numbers first

Before you talk to sales, know your monthly volume (GB, IPs or requests), your growth rate, your target locations and your current cost per successful result. Providers price by risk and volume; showing you understand both gets you a better offer.

What you can usually negotiate

• Volume price. A lower rate per GB or per IP in exchange for a monthly or annual commitment.
• Expiry terms. Longer validity for purchased traffic, or rollover of unused bandwidth.
• Trial size. A larger free test allowance for a serious evaluation.
• Support level. A dedicated contact, a shared chat channel, faster response times.
• Custom pools. Dedicated IP ranges or exclusions for specific targets.
• Payment terms. Invoicing, monthly billing instead of prepay, or a different currency.

What to be careful with

• Long commitments. A year is a long time in this market. Ask for a quarterly or six-month term, or an exit clause tied to performance.
• Minimum spend you won't reach. Commit to what you'll use, not what you hope to use.
• Performance promises without measurement. If a provider promises a success rate, agree how it will be measured.

Use your benchmark

Your benchmark results are your best leverage. "Provider B gave us 96% on these targets at this price; can you match it?" is a far stronger position than "can you do better?". Keep the runner-up warm; credible alternatives get better offers.

Reading a proxy dashboard like a pro

A good dashboard tells you almost everything you need to manage your proxies. Most buyers only look at the remaining balance. Here is what else to check, and what it tells you about whether you still have the best proxies for your work.

Usage over time

Look for unexpected spikes (a bug or a runaway job), steady growth (time to renegotiate or switch to unlimited) and drops (a job that stopped working without anyone noticing).

Usage by sub-user or job

If you've set up sub-users, check which jobs drive cost. One job using half your bandwidth is a prime candidate for page-weight optimisation or a move to a cheaper proxy type.

Success and error rates

Some dashboards show error breakdowns. A rise in authentication errors suggests a credential or allowlist problem; a rise in target errors suggests blocks.

Geo distribution

Check that traffic exits where you asked. Unexpected countries can mean a misconfigured username or a provider routing problem.

IP list health

For static proxies, check which IPs are flagged or slow and request replacements where your plan allows. See Webshare proxy replacements.

Billing and expiry

Note when traffic expires, when subscriptions renew and whether auto-top-up is on. Many unexpected bills come from forgotten auto-renewals.

Support: the underrated part of the best proxy service

When everything works, support doesn't matter. When something breaks during a release, a client deadline or a data pipeline run, support is the only thing that matters. It's worth testing before you need it.

How to test support during a trial

1. Ask a real technical question, such as how to set a 30-minute sticky session in a specific country with SOCKS5.
2. Note the response time and whether the answer is correct and specific.
3. Ask a billing question, such as what happens to unused traffic.
4. Ask a sourcing question, such as how residential IPs are obtained.

The best proxy providers answer all three clearly. Slow, vague or copy-pasted answers during a trial predict worse support once you're a paying customer.

What good support looks like

• Response within an hour during business hours for paying customers, faster for urgent issues.
• Engineers or trained staff who can read logs and reproduce problems.
• Clear escalation for outages.
• A public status page and incident history.
• Documentation good enough that you rarely need to ask.

See proxy provider support and SLA.

Questions to ask yourself before buying the best proxies

Before you talk to any provider, answer these for yourself. They take ten minutes and make every later decision easier.

1. What exactly am I collecting or doing, and on which sites?
2. Do those sites block datacenter IPs? (Test it.)
3. Do I need the same IP for a long time, or many different IPs?
4. Which countries, states or cities do I need?
5. How many requests or accounts, per day and per month?
6. How heavy is each page or request?
7. Which tools will use the proxies, and what authentication do they support?
8. What's my budget per month, and what's the value of the result?
9. Who on my team will maintain the setup?
10. Is there anything legal, contractual or ethical I need to check first?

With those answers, you can choose the proxy type in minutes, shortlist providers in an hour, and find your best proxies with a one-week test. That process, more than any single ranking, is what this guide is about.

Your first hour with the best proxies

Many buyers lose their first day to setup problems that have nothing to do with proxy quality: wrong port, wrong username format, a missing allowlist entry, a browser that ignores credentials. This walkthrough gets you from purchase to a verified, working setup in about an hour, whichever provider you choose.

Minutes 0 to 10: collect the details

From your provider's dashboard, note down:

• The gateway host and ports (often one port for HTTP and another for SOCKS5).
• Your username and password, or the allowlist settings.
• The username format for options such as country, city, session ID and session duration.
• Any thread, connection or bandwidth limits on your plan.

Write them in a password manager or a secrets file, not in a chat message or a shared document.

Minutes 10 to 20: verify with curl

Before you touch your real tool, check the basics from the machine that will use the proxies.

# exit IP and location
curl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000 https://ipinfo.io/json

# same, forcing a country (format varies by provider)
curl -x http://USERNAME-country-de:PASSWORD@gateway.example.com:8000 https://ipinfo.io/json

Run each a few times. With rotation, the IP should change; with a session ID, it should stay the same. The country should match what you asked for. If you get a 407 error, check the credentials and the allowlist. See curl proxy.

Minutes 20 to 35: connect your real tool

Add the proxy to your scraper, browser automation, antidetect browser or extension, using the method that tool supports best (see the tools section earlier on this page). Load an IP echo page through the tool and confirm the exit IP and country again. In a browser, also check for WebRTC leaks, which can reveal your real IP. See WebRTC leaks and proxies.

Minutes 35 to 50: run a small real test

Point the tool at one real target and run 50 to 100 requests at a gentle pace. Count how many return real content, not just a 200 status. Note the median response time. If results are poor, try a different proxy type or slow down before assuming the proxies are bad.

Minutes 50 to 60: set safeguards

• Set a spending cap or usage alert in the dashboard.
• Add a timeout and retry limit in your code.
• Log the exit IP, country, status and duration for each request.
• Save your working configuration, with notes, somewhere your team can find it.

You now have a verified setup and a baseline to measure against. Everything else on this page is about improving that baseline.

How many proxies do you need? Formulas and worked examples

"How many proxies should I buy?" is one of the most common questions we get. The answer depends on whether you buy IPs or bandwidth, and on what each IP is doing. Here are the formulas we use to size a plan for the best proxies.

Rotating residential: size by bandwidth, not IPs

With rotating residential proxies you don't buy IPs; the gateway gives you as many as you need. Size the plan by bandwidth:

monthly GB = requests per month x average MB per request / 1000 / success rate

Example: 500,000 requests a month at 0.4 MB each with a 95% success rate is about 500,000 x 0.4 / 1000 / 0.95, roughly 211 GB a month. Cut the page weight to 0.1 MB and the same job needs about 53 GB.

Static IPs for identities: one per identity, plus spares

For accounts, checkout tasks and browser profiles, you need one IP per identity running at the same time, plus a margin for replacements.

IPs needed = active identities x 1.1 (10% spare for replacements)

Example: 40 managed social accounts need about 44 static ISP proxies.

Static IPs for scraping: size by per-IP rate

If you scrape through a static list, size it so that each IP stays under the target's tolerance.

IPs needed = peak requests per minute / safe requests per minute per IP

Example: 600 requests a minute at peak, with a safe rate of 5 requests a minute per IP on the target, needs about 120 IPs. If you don't know the safe rate, start conservative (1 to 5 a minute for protected sites) and raise it while watching success.

Sneaker tasks

For releases, the usual guide is one proxy per task, because each task needs its own identity through checkout. 50 tasks need about 50 ISP proxies. See how many proxies for a sneaker bot.

Monitors

Monitors poll a site frequently for changes. Size them so each IP polls at a rate the site tolerates, and use cheap datacenter IPs where possible.

IPs needed = (products monitored x polls per minute) / safe polls per minute per IP

Unlimited plans: size by speed or threads

Unlimited residential plans are priced by bandwidth speed or concurrent threads. Estimate your peak throughput:

required Mbps = peak requests per second x average MB per request x 8

Example: 20 requests a second at 0.3 MB each needs about 48 Mbps. Add headroom for bursts. See unlimited bandwidth proxies.

Sizing summary

The fine print: terms of service clauses to read before buying

The best proxies can come with terms that don't suit you. Five minutes with the terms of service and acceptable use policy can save you from a suspended account or an unexpected bill. These are the clauses we always read.

Acceptable use

Every reputable provider bans fraud, attacks, spam and illegal activity. Many also restrict specific targets or categories, such as certain financial, government, ticketing or social platforms, or require extra verification before allowing them. Check that your intended use is allowed. See Webshare restricted sites and KYC.

Verification and KYC

Some providers require identity or business verification before you can use residential traffic or access certain sites. Plan for it, especially if you need to start quickly.

Bandwidth expiry and rollover

Find out exactly when purchased traffic expires, if it does, and whether unused traffic rolls over on renewal.

Refunds

Note the refund window, the maximum usage allowed for a refund and any excluded products.

Suspension and termination

Check what triggers suspension, whether you get a warning, and what happens to your balance if your account is closed.

Fair use on unlimited plans

Unlimited plans often have fair-use clauses. Read what they define as abuse and what happens if you exceed it.

Liability and service levels

Most self-serve plans offer little or no compensation for downtime. If uptime matters, look for an SLA on business plans, and keep a backup provider regardless.

Data and logging

Look for what the provider logs (connection metadata, destinations, content), how long it keeps logs and when it shares them. For business use, ask for a data processing agreement.

Reselling

If you plan to provide proxies to clients as part of a service, check whether that counts as reselling under the terms.

The best proxies for twenty more specialised jobs

The main use-case sections cover the jobs most buyers have. These are the less common jobs we're asked about, each with the best proxy type to start from and the one setting that matters most.

1. Affiliate link testing

Affiliate marketers check that links redirect correctly, that offers display in each country and that tracking fires. Best proxies: residential with country targeting, sticky through the full redirect chain. Key setting: follow redirects and log every hop with the exit country. See Geonode for affiliate link testing.

2. App store research

App store rankings, reviews and featured lists vary by country. Best proxies: residential or mobile in each store country. Key setting: match the store's country parameter to the IP location. See Geonode for app store research.

3. B2B lead research

Sales teams research company websites, directories and public business listings. Best proxies: datacenter for most company sites, residential for directories with bot protection. Key setting: low concurrency per domain. Respect privacy laws when handling personal contact data. See Geonode for B2B lead research.

4. Dropshipping and product research

Store owners look for trending products, supplier prices and competitor stores. Best proxies: residential for marketplaces, datacenter for small stores. Key setting: country targeting to match the market you sell into. See Geonode for dropshipping research.

5. Review monitoring

Brands track reviews on marketplaces, app stores and review sites. Best proxies: residential, rotating per request. Key setting: schedule collection daily rather than continuously; reviews don't change by the minute. See Geonode for review monitoring.

6. Classified ads and marketplaces

Analysts track listings on classified sites for pricing and market research. Best proxies: residential with country or city targeting, since many classifieds are local. Key setting: gentle pacing; classified sites often rate-limit hard.

7. Public procurement and tenders

Companies monitor government tender portals for opportunities. Best proxies: datacenter usually works; some portals restrict access to local IPs, which calls for residential in that country. Key setting: respect portal terms and rate limits.

8. Event and venue information

Travel and event businesses track schedules, venue details and public availability. Best proxies: residential for protected sites. Key setting: collect public information only; never use proxies to bypass purchase limits on ticketing platforms.

9. Domain and DNS research

Security and SEO teams check how domains resolve and what they serve in different regions. Best proxies: datacenter in multiple regions, with SOCKS5 and remote DNS where you need lookups from the proxy's location.

10. CDN and performance testing

Engineers check page speed and caching from different locations. Best proxies: datacenter or ISP in each region for consistent measurements. Key setting: measure from fixed IPs so results are comparable over time.

11. Geo-restriction testing

Product teams confirm that content, pricing or features are correctly restricted or available by country. Best proxies: residential in each country. Key setting: test from several IPs per country, since geolocation databases disagree.

12. Email and link safety checks

Security teams open suspicious links from a safe, anonymous location. Best proxies: residential, so phishing kits that cloak against scanners show their real content. Key setting: isolated environments only.

13. Search engine localisation research

International SEO teams compare results across languages and countries. Best proxies: residential with country targeting, plus correct language and location parameters. See SEO proxies.

14. Social listening

Brands track public mentions and trends across platforms. Best proxies: residential for public pages, or official APIs where available. Key setting: prefer official data access when it exists; it's more stable than scraping.

15. Price intelligence for B2B catalogues

Distributors track competitor catalogues, which may require a login. Best proxies: static ISP for logged-in access, one IP per account. Key setting: only use accounts you're entitled to.

16. Map and local listing data

Businesses collect public location data such as opening hours and ratings. Best proxies: residential with city targeting, or a map data API. See Geonode for local SEO.

17. News archive research

Researchers collect historical articles for analysis. Best proxies: datacenter for most archives, residential for stricter publishers. Key setting: respect paywalls and licensing.

18. Automated QA of ad landing pages

Advertisers confirm that landing pages load and convert correctly in each targeted market. Best proxies: residential or mobile matching the ad's targeting. Key setting: match device type to the ad placement.

19. Crawling your own sites at scale

Large site owners crawl their own properties to find broken links and SEO issues. Best proxies: often none needed; if your own firewall rate-limits your crawler, allowlist it instead. Use datacenter proxies only to test regional behaviour.

20. Personal location checks

Individuals check how a site looks from another country, for example to compare prices. Best proxies: a single residential IP in a browser extension. Key setting: keep it in a separate browser profile from your everyday logins.

Specialised jobs summary

Common questions from people comparing best proxy lists

Readers who arrive here after reading other "best proxies" articles often have the same handful of questions about why lists disagree. These short answers explain the most common confusions.

Why does every list have a different number one?

Because each list weights criteria differently and tests different targets, and some are influenced by affiliate payouts. Use the scorecard on this page to apply your own weights instead.

Why do some lists include providers I've never heard of?

Smaller providers and resellers sometimes pay well for placement. Some are good; some are rebranded access to another provider's network. Ask them where their IPs come from, and test before buying.

Why do pool sizes differ so much between lists?

Providers count differently (monthly unique IPs versus live IPs), and lists often copy marketing figures without checking. Treat pool numbers as rough indicators only. See proxy pool size.

Why do prices on lists not match the provider's site?

Prices change often, lists go out of date, and some lists quote the lowest price at the largest commitment. Always check the current pricing page for the volume you'll actually buy.

Should I trust user reviews on review platforms?

They're useful for spotting patterns, especially about support and billing, but individual reviews are easy to fake and often reflect one bad day. Look for consistent themes across many reviews over time.

Is a provider with an affiliate program less trustworthy?

No. Most providers, including the best proxy brands, run affiliate programs. What matters is whether the reviewer discloses the relationship and still tells you when a partner isn't the right choice. We disclose ours with Geonode and Webshare, and we've tried to be specific on this page about where each one is not the best fit.

How do I combine several lists into a decision?

Take the providers that appear in the right category across several independent lists, filter by your proxy type, budget and locations, then benchmark the top three yourself. Lists narrow the field; your own test decides.

Buyer's checklists for each kind of best proxy

Each proxy type has its own quality signals. A great residential network and a great ISP provider are judged on different things. Use the checklist for the type you're buying during your trial, and you'll know within a few days whether you've found the best proxies of that type for your work.

Checklist: the best residential proxies

Residential proxies are judged on pool quality, geo depth, session control and cost per GB.

1. Live pool in your countries. Send 1,000 rotating requests per key country and count unique IPs. Few repeats is a good sign.
2. Geo accuracy. Check a sample of exit IPs in two independent geolocation databases. Most should match the requested country; state and city accuracy will be lower.
3. Success on your hardest target. This is the number that justifies the residential price.
4. Sticky session reliability. Hold a 10-minute and a 30-minute session and record how often the IP changes early.
5. Speed distribution. Median under a couple of seconds on normal pages is typical; look closely at p95.
6. Targeting options. Country, state, city, ZIP and ASN, as far as you need them.
7. Protocols. HTTP and SOCKS5 on the same plan.
8. Billing. Per-GB price at your volume, expiry rules, and whether there's an unlimited option for later.
9. Sourcing. A clear, credible explanation of consent.
10. Tools. Sub-users, usage stats per sub-user, an API for usage and credentials.

See best residential proxies, residential proxies and residential proxy providers compared.

Checklist: the best ISP proxies

ISP proxies are judged on IP quality, speed, location and how the provider handles replacements.

1. ASN and ISP name. Look up each IP. It should belong to a consumer ISP, not a hosting company.
2. Clean history. Check a sample against common blocklists and test on your key targets on day one.
3. Location. City and data center location matter for latency, especially for sneakers.
4. Speed. Expect fast, consistent responses, close to datacenter speeds.
5. Exclusivity. Dedicated (only you) or shared (a few customers), and at what price difference.
6. Bandwidth. Unmetered or capped, and what happens at the cap.
7. Replacements. How many replacement IPs you get and how quickly.
8. Subnet diversity. IPs spread across several subnets are less likely to be blocked together.
9. Protocols and authentication. HTTP and SOCKS5; credentials and allowlisting.
10. Renewal. Whether you keep the same IPs when you renew.

See best ISP proxies, ISP proxies and ISP proxy providers compared.

Checklist: the best datacenter proxies

Datacenter proxies are judged on price, speed, subnet diversity and how many sites they work on.

1. Success on your targets. If they work, they are your best proxies; if not, nothing else matters.
2. Subnet diversity. Many /24 subnets, so one block doesn't take out your whole list.
3. Locations. Countries and cities available.
4. Speed and uptime. Datacenter proxies should be fast and stable.
5. Shared, semi-dedicated or dedicated. And the price of each.
6. Bandwidth and threads. Caps and limits on your plan.
7. Refresh and replacement. Whether you can swap IPs or refresh the list.
8. Rotation. Lists, a rotating gateway, or both.
9. Price per IP or per GB. At your volume.
10. Protocols. HTTP and SOCKS5.

See best datacenter proxies, datacenter proxies and datacenter proxy providers compared.

Checklist: the best mobile proxies

Mobile proxies are judged on carrier quality, rotation control, stability and price per port or per GB.

1. Real carrier IPs. Look up the ASN; it should be a mobile carrier.
2. Carriers and countries. The specific carriers and countries you need.
3. Rotation control. On-demand IP change by API or link, and timed rotation.
4. Stability between rotations. The IP should hold steady until you rotate it.
5. Speed. Mobile speeds vary; test at the times you'll use them.
6. Dedicated ports or devices. Whether you share a device with other customers.
7. Pricing model. Per port per month, per GB, or both.
8. Protocols. HTTP and SOCKS5, sometimes UDP.
9. Network type. 4G or 5G, and whether that matters for your target.
10. Support. Mobile networks have more moving parts; good support matters.

See best mobile proxies, mobile proxies and mobile proxy providers compared.

Checklist: the best SOCKS5 proxies

SOCKS5 is a protocol rather than a proxy type, but SOCKS5 buyers often have specific needs.

1. SOCKS5 on the proxy type you need. Residential, ISP, datacenter or mobile.
2. Authentication. Username and password support for SOCKS5, not just allowlisting.
3. Remote DNS. Works correctly with socks5h or equivalent.
4. UDP support. If your app needs it.
5. Client compatibility. Test with the exact app you'll use.

See best SOCKS5 proxies and SOCKS5 proxies.

Checklist: the best scraping API or unblocker

If you're considering paying per page instead of per GB:

1. Success rate on your hardest targets.
2. Price per successful request, including any JavaScript rendering surcharge.
3. Latency, which is often higher than raw proxies because of retries and rendering.
4. Geo-targeting options.
5. Output formats: raw HTML, rendered HTML, screenshots, structured data.
6. Session support for multi-step flows.
7. Concurrency limits on your plan.
8. Free allowance for testing.

See web unblocker proxies, scraping API vs proxies and Geonode scraper API.

A twelve-month maintenance calendar for your proxies

Proxies aren't set-and-forget. This calendar spreads the checks that keep you on the best proxies across the year, so nothing important is missed and no single month is overloaded.

Every week

• Review success rate per target and investigate any drops.
• Check bandwidth usage against budget.
• Send test traffic through your backup provider.

Every month

• Review cost per job and look for jobs whose cost is creeping up.
• Request replacements for flagged static IPs.
• Check upcoming renewals and expiring traffic.
• Rotate any credentials shared with contractors.

Every quarter

• Re-run your full benchmark on your primary provider and at least one alternative.
• Re-score providers with your weighted scorecard.
• Review page weight and retry logic for your heaviest jobs.
• Review your acceptable use policy and any new targets.

Twice a year

• Review contracts, commitments and pricing; renegotiate if your volume has changed.
• Check each provider's sourcing and compliance documentation for changes.
• Review which team members have proxy access.

Once a year

• Run a full market scan: are there new providers or products that should be on your shortlist?
• Review whether your proxy mix (datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile, APIs) still matches your jobs.
• Update internal documentation and onboarding notes.

Billing terms every best proxy buyer should understand

Proxy pricing pages use a lot of jargon. Misreading one term can double your real cost. These are the billing and pricing terms that matter most when comparing the best proxies.

Per GB

You pay for the data transferred through the proxy, usually counting both upload and download. Common for residential and mobile proxies. Your cost depends heavily on page weight.

Per IP

You pay a fixed price per IP per month, often with unmetered or generous bandwidth. Common for ISP and datacenter proxies.

Per port

Common for mobile proxies: you rent a port (often tied to a device or modem) that gives you a mobile IP you can rotate.

Per request

Common for scraping APIs: you pay per successful request, sometimes with extra charges for JavaScript rendering or premium targets.

Unlimited

A flat price for unlimited bandwidth, usually limited by speed, threads or concurrent connections, and subject to fair use.

Pay-as-you-go

You buy a balance and spend it as you go, with no subscription. Often combined with non-expiring traffic.

Subscription

A recurring monthly plan with a fixed allowance. Check whether unused allowance expires or rolls over.

Overage

The price you pay for usage beyond your plan's allowance. Sometimes the same as the plan rate, sometimes much higher.

Commitment

A promise to spend a minimum amount per month or year in exchange for a lower rate.

Threads and concurrency

The number of simultaneous connections your plan allows. A low limit can bottleneck browser-based scraping.

Replacements

The number of times you can swap a static IP for a new one, per month or per plan.

Sub-users

Separate credentials under your account, each with its own usage tracking and, often, its own limits.

See proxy pricing models, proxy bandwidth pricing explained, pay-as-you-go proxies and Webshare pricing explained.

Best proxies: the summary in one table

If you read nothing else on this page, read this table. It maps the most common situations to the best proxies to start with and the guide that goes deeper.

Whatever your situation, the method is the same: choose the proxy type from the job, shortlist providers, test on your real targets, score the results, and keep a backup. That's how you find the best proxies for you, rather than the best proxies for someone else's list.

Six complete best-proxy stacks, with rough monthly costs

It helps to see whole setups rather than individual products. These six stacks are typical of what we see working well at different sizes. Costs are rough monthly ranges at the time of writing, to show proportions rather than quotes; check current prices before you buy.

Stack 1: The learner (about $0 to $10)

• Proxies: a provider's free plan with a handful of datacenter proxies, plus an optional few dollars of pay-as-you-go residential traffic.
• Tools: curl, Python requests, a browser extension.
• What it's good for: learning how proxies behave, small personal projects, testing whether a site blocks datacenter IPs.
• Upgrade trigger: you need more than a few IPs, residential trust, or reliability.

Stack 2: The side project (about $10 to $50)

• Proxies: a small datacenter list for easy targets, and a few GB of non-expiring residential traffic for hard ones.
• Tools: a Python or Node scraper with retries and logging; a scheduled job.
• What it's good for: price tracking, small research projects, personal dashboards.
• Upgrade trigger: residential usage grows past a few GB a month, or the project starts earning money.

Stack 3: The small agency (about $100 to $400)

• Proxies: 20 to 60 static ISP proxies (one per managed account) plus a small residential balance for research and ad checks.
• Tools: an antidetect browser with one profile per account; a spreadsheet or tool that maps accounts to IPs.
• What it's good for: social media management, ad account management, local SEO checks for clients.
• Upgrade trigger: more clients, or the need for mobile IPs on the strictest platforms.

Stack 4: The data startup (about $500 to $3,000)

• Proxies: a primary residential provider chosen by benchmark, a cheap datacenter pool for easy targets, a small backup residential balance with a second provider, and a scraping API for the two or three hardest sites.
• Tools: Scrapy or Playwright workers in containers; a proxy configuration module; per-target success dashboards.
• What it's good for: product data, market intelligence, alternative data for clients.
• Upgrade trigger: steady residential volume high enough that an unlimited plan becomes cheaper.

Stack 5: The sneaker group (about $100 to $1,000 per release)

• Proxies: ISP proxies near store servers, one per task; residential as a backup; cheap datacenter IPs for monitors.
• Tools: a sneaker bot on a server close to the stores; a monitor service.
• What it's good for: limited releases on Shopify stores and footsites.
• Upgrade trigger: more tasks, or more sites requiring residential traffic.

Stack 6: The scaled operation (over $5,000)

• Proxies: two contracted residential providers, an unlimited residential plan for the heaviest steady targets, a large datacenter pool, ISP proxies for logged-in jobs and scraping APIs for the hardest targets.
• Tools: a routing layer that picks the cheapest proxy type that works for each target; automatic promotion and demotion between types based on success; cost reporting per client.
• What it's good for: large-scale data collection across hundreds of sites.
• Upgrade trigger: procurement, compliance and SLA requirements.

What experienced proxy buyers do differently

After years of reader questions, a pattern is clear. The people who get the most from their proxies don't necessarily buy from different providers. They work differently. Here are the habits that set them apart.

They start from the target, not the provider

Experienced buyers look at what the target site does to automated traffic before they look at a single pricing page. The target decides the proxy type; the proxy type narrows the providers.

They measure cost per result

They never compare providers on price per GB alone. They compare cost per successful page, per working account or per completed checkout, including retries and engineering time.

They split traffic by difficulty

Easy targets go through the cheapest proxies; hard targets go through residential or mobile; the hardest go through an API. One proxy type for everything is almost always overpaying somewhere.

They obsess over page weight

They block images, fonts, media and tracking scripts, call JSON endpoints where allowed, and cache what doesn't change. A 70% cut in bandwidth is a 70% cut in residential cost.

They keep a backup

There is always a second provider, configured and tested, with a small balance. Outages become a non-event.

They log everything

Every request has its provider, type, exit country, session, status, size and duration recorded. When something breaks, they know what, where and when within minutes.

They re-test

They benchmark quarterly, because they know the best proxies this quarter may not be the best proxies next quarter.

They avoid long commitments

They buy monthly or pay-as-you-go until they have months of data, and they negotiate only from benchmark results.

They respect targets

They pace requests, collect only what they need, and avoid harming the sites they rely on. Gentle, well-behaved collection lasts longer and costs less than aggressive collection that triggers ever-stronger defences.

They read the terms

They know what their provider allows, what triggers suspension and when traffic expires, so nothing surprises them.

Warning signs during a proxy trial

Most problems with a provider show up in the first few days if you know what to watch for. If you see several of these during a trial, keep looking for your best proxies elsewhere.

• Exit IPs that don't match the requested country in more than a small share of requests.
• Many repeated IPs in a rotating sample, suggesting a smaller live pool than advertised.
• IPs owned by hosting companies on a "residential" plan.
• Success rate that falls day by day during the trial.
• Sticky sessions that drop well before the requested duration, much more often than other providers.
• Usage counts that don't match your own logs. A small difference is normal; a large one is not.
• Slow or evasive support on technical, billing or sourcing questions.
• No clear answer on IP sourcing.
• Pressure to buy a large or annual plan before you've finished testing.
• Terms that change or that you can't find easily.

One warning sign on its own may have an innocent explanation. Several together usually mean the provider isn't the best proxy option for you, however good the price looks.

Keeping this best proxies guide useful for you

This page has grown into one of the longest guides on the subject because buyers kept asking for more detail: more use cases, more tools, more worked examples, more honest comparisons. A guide this long works best as a reference rather than a single read.

How to navigate it

• New to proxies? Read the opening sections on proxy types and the decision tree, then jump to "Your first hour with the best proxies".
• Choosing a provider? Use the scorecard, the benchmark method and the checklists for your proxy type.
• Already running proxies? Go to the production, troubleshooting and maintenance sections.
• Comparing lists? Read "How to read any best proxies ranking" and "Common questions from people comparing best proxy lists".
• Looking for a specific job? Use the industry, platform, tools and specialised jobs sections, each of which links to a deeper guide.

Related guides

For deeper coverage of any single topic, these are the guides readers find most useful after this one:

• How to choose a proxy provider
• How to test proxies before buying
• Proxy pricing guide
• Best residential proxies
• Best ISP proxies
• Best datacenter proxies
• Cheap proxies
• Webshare vs Geonode
• Proxy glossary

If something on this page is out of date or unclear, or you'd like a job or tool covered that isn't here, let us know through the site's contact page. Reader questions are how this guide to the best proxies keeps improving.

What good looks like: performance targets for the best proxies

Buyers often ask what numbers they should expect. Exact figures depend on the target, your tooling and the time of day, but these ranges reflect what a well-configured setup with good proxies typically achieves. If your numbers are far below them, something in the setup or the provider is worth investigating.

Targets by proxy type

"Suitable targets" matters. Datacenter proxies at 20% success on a strict marketplace aren't bad proxies; they're the wrong proxies for that target.

Targets by job

When to act

• Success rate drops more than five points below its usual level for a day: investigate the target, your setup and the provider, in that order.
• p95 latency doubles: check gateway location and page weight, and ask the provider about congestion.
• Bandwidth per success rises: a target may have added heavier assets or your resource blocking may have broken.
• Ban rate on accounts rises: review IP assignments, locations and behaviour before buying more IPs.

Explaining your best proxy choice to a manager or client

Often the person choosing the proxies isn't the person approving the spend. A short, clear write-up makes approval easier and protects you if something goes wrong later. Here is a template we've seen work well.

A one-page proxy recommendation template

1. What we need proxies for. One or two sentences on the job and the targets. For example: "Collect daily prices for 5,000 products from 30 retail sites in the US and UK."

2. Proxy type and why. "Datacenter for 24 sites that allow it; rotating residential for 6 sites that block datacenter IPs. Tested on 14 to 18 October."

3. Providers tested. "Three residential providers and two datacenter providers, each with 1,000 requests per target over five days."

4. Results. A small table of success rate, median latency, cost per 1,000 successful pages and support response for each provider.

5. Recommendation. "Provider A for residential (96% success, lowest cost per result); Provider D for datacenter. Provider B as residential backup."

6. Monthly cost estimate. Expected cost, with a range for growth.

7. Risks and mitigations. "Targets may tighten bot protection; we monitor success daily and keep a backup provider. Terms reviewed; no restricted targets. IP sourcing documentation on file."

8. Review date. "Re-benchmark in January."

Why it works

It shows that the choice was tested rather than guessed, it puts cost in terms of results, and it sets expectations that proxies need ongoing attention. When a manager asks six months later why you chose a provider, the answer is already written down.

For agencies and consultants

If you resell proxy-dependent services, include the proxy cost in your pricing as a pass-through or a managed line item, and agree with the client in advance how blocked or failed collection will be handled. Clients are far more forgiving of a planned fallback than of a surprise gap in their data.

Glossary additions: best proxy terms people search for

The main glossary on this page covers the core vocabulary. These are extra terms that appear often in "best proxies" comparisons and reviews, with plain-English definitions.

• ASN targeting: choosing exit IPs from a specific network operator (an autonomous system), for example one consumer ISP.
• Backconnect: a gateway that connects you onward to a changing exit IP. See backconnect proxies.
• Carrier-grade NAT: mobile networks sharing one public IP among many users, which is why carrier IPs are hard to block.
• Clean IP: an IP without recent abuse history on the targets you care about.
• Concurrency: how many requests or sessions run at the same time.
• Elite proxy: a proxy that doesn't add headers revealing proxy use. See proxy anonymity levels.
• Exit node: the device or server whose IP the target sees.
• Fair use: limits on "unlimited" plans to prevent extreme usage.
• Fingerprint: the combination of browser, TLS and device properties that identifies a client.
• Gateway: the host and port you connect to for rotating proxies.
• Geo accuracy: how often an exit IP geolocates where you requested.
• IP allowlisting: authorising your own IP so you can use proxies without a password.
• p95 latency: the response time that 95% of requests beat; a measure of the slow tail.
• Pool: the set of IPs a provider can route you through.
• Rotation: changing the exit IP per request or per time interval.
• Session ID: a value in the proxy username that keeps you on the same IP.
• Sticky session: keeping one exit IP for a set period.
• Sub-user: separate credentials under one account for tracking and limits.
• Subnet: a block of related IP addresses; diversity across subnets reduces block risk.
• Success rate: the share of requests that return the real content you wanted.
• Unblocker: a service that handles blocks, CAPTCHAs and rendering for you. See web unblocker proxies.

For the full list, see the proxy glossary.

The best proxies for journalists, nonprofits and researchers at risk

Some proxy buyers aren't collecting data for profit. Journalists, human rights researchers, nonprofits and investigators use proxies to research sensitive subjects, check how content appears in other countries, and keep their own organisation's IP addresses out of the logs of the sites they investigate. Their priorities differ from those of commercial buyers, and so do their best proxies.

Priorities

• Separation from the organisation. Research traffic shouldn't come from the newsroom's or charity's own IP range, which can be recognised.
• Realistic viewpoints. Seeing a site as an ordinary local visitor sees it, including geo-blocked or cloaked content.
• Low cost. Budgets are usually small and irregular.
• Clear provider ethics. Organisations working on human rights can't afford to rely on a network built on non-consensual IP sourcing.

Best proxies to start with

• A small balance of non-expiring residential traffic with country targeting, used through a dedicated browser profile.
• A few datacenter proxies for bulk, low-risk collection of public pages.
• For high-risk investigations, expert advice on operational security. A proxy hides your IP address, but not your accounts, your browser fingerprint or your device.

Practical precautions

1. Use a separate browser profile or virtual machine for investigations, with no personal logins.
2. Match the profile's time zone and language to the proxy location when you need a local view.
3. Check for WebRTC and DNS leaks before relying on the setup.
4. Capture evidence (screenshots, page source, timestamps, exit country) as you go.
5. Remember that the proxy provider can see where your traffic goes. Choose one with a clear privacy policy, and use HTTPS throughout.

For anyone facing serious threats, tools designed for anonymity, combined with expert security guidance, are more appropriate than commercial proxies alone. Proxies are a useful research tool, not a complete safety plan.

The best proxies for remote and distributed teams

Remote teams use proxies in ways office teams don't: to give staff in different countries a consistent location for shared accounts, to test services as customers in a home market see them, and to reach tools that restrict logins by IP.

Common needs

• A fixed IP for shared accounts. If several team members in different countries log in to the same business account, that account sees logins from all over the world. One static ISP proxy in the account's home country, used by everyone, keeps the pattern consistent.
• IP-restricted tools. Some business tools only accept logins from allowlisted IPs. A static proxy gives the team one allowlisted address wherever they are.
• Home-market testing. Staff abroad need to see the product as customers in the home market do.

Best proxies for this

Static ISP proxies are usually the best proxy choice: fixed, fast, residential-looking IPs that don't change. For home-market testing, a small residential balance with country targeting adds flexibility.

Watch out for

• Shared credentials. Give each person their own sub-user where possible, so you can remove access when someone leaves.
• Security policy. Corporate VPNs or zero-trust access tools may be the better answer for internal systems; proxies suit external accounts and testing.
• Terms of service. Some platforms prohibit account sharing regardless of IP. A proxy doesn't change that.

FAQ

What is the best type of proxy overall?

For most buyers who don't know exactly what they need, rotating residential proxies are the safest default because they work on the widest range of websites. If you need a fixed IP, choose ISP proxies. If your targets are lenient and you need volume, datacenter proxies are far cheaper.

Are free proxies ever the best option?

Almost never for real work. Public free proxies are slow, unreliable, often already blocked, and some are run specifically to intercept traffic. A provider's free trial is fine. A random free proxy list is not. Read the risks of free proxies.

What are the best proxies for beginners?

A pay-as-you-go residential plan from a provider with a clean dashboard and good documentation. You avoid big commitments and you learn what your real usage looks like. See best proxies for beginners.

Do I need a VPN or a proxy?

A VPN protects all of a device's traffic and is designed for privacy. A proxy is usually configured per application and is designed for tasks such as scraping, automation and managing multiple identities. See proxy vs VPN.

Are proxies legal?

Using a proxy is legal in most countries. What you do through it is subject to the same laws and website terms as anything else. Read are proxies legal? for the details.

What are the best proxies for a complete beginner?

Start with a provider's free plan or a very small pay-as-you-go residential balance, and use it in a browser extension or a simple script. Free plans with real authentication, such as Webshare's, teach you how proxies behave without risk. When you hit a site that blocks datacenter IPs, add a small residential balance. See best proxies for beginners.

What is the single best proxy type overall?

There isn't one. Rotating residential proxies are the most versatile, so if you can only buy one product without testing, they are the safest choice. But datacenter proxies are the best proxies for lenient targets, ISP proxies for accounts, and mobile proxies for the strictest mobile platforms.

How do I know whether I picked the best proxies for my job?

Measure cost per successful result on your real targets, and compare it with at least one alternative. If your success rate is above about 95%, your cost per result is lower than the alternative, and your setup has been stable for a few weeks, you have the best proxies for that job, at least for now.

Are the best proxies the same for scraping and for account management?

No. Scraping rewards large rotating pools and low cost per GB. Account management rewards clean, static IPs that stay the same for months. Most teams that do both use different products for each, and keep them on separate credentials.

What is the best proxy for web scraping in Python?

A rotating residential or datacenter gateway, depending on the target, used through the proxies argument in requests or httpx. Rotation happens on the provider's side, so your code stays simple. See Python requests proxies.

What are the best proxies for Puppeteer and Playwright?

Sticky residential sessions for protected targets, and static ISP proxies for logged-in automation. Playwright can set a different proxy per browser context; Puppeteer usually needs one browser per proxy, or a per-page proxy helper. See Puppeteer proxies and Playwright proxies.

Which are the best proxies for sneaker bots?

ISP proxies located close to the store's servers are the usual first choice, with residential proxies as a backup when ISP ranges are flagged on a specific site. Cheap datacenter proxies work well for monitors. See best proxies for sneaker bots.

What are the best proxies for Instagram and TikTok?

Mobile proxies or static ISP proxies, one per account, in the account's home country. Keep each account on the same IP for as long as possible, and warm new accounts up slowly. See best proxies for Instagram and best proxies for TikTok.

What are the best proxies for SEO rank tracking?

Rotating residential proxies with city targeting for local results, used at a low query rate per IP. For many teams, a SERP API is cheaper overall. See best proxies for SEO rank tracking.

Are the best proxies always the most expensive?

No. Price reflects proxy type, brand and support as much as quality. The best proxies for a lenient target can cost a few dollars a month. Even for hard targets, a mid-priced provider can beat a premium one on your specific sites.

How much should I budget for the best proxies?

For learning, nothing to a few dollars a month. For a first real project, $20 to $200 a month is typical. Production workloads range from a few hundred to many thousands of dollars a month, driven mainly by bandwidth. See proxy pricing guide.

Is it worth paying for city-level targeting?

Only when what you collect changes by city, such as local search results, map listings, local ads or delivery availability. Otherwise, country or state targeting is cheaper and draws from a larger pool.

What is a good success rate for the best proxies?

On moderately protected targets with a sensible setup, 95% or more is a good result. On very strict targets, 85% to 90% can be acceptable if retries are cheap. Below 80%, something is wrong with the proxy type, the provider or your setup.

How long should a sticky session last?

As long as the task needs and no longer. A few minutes for multi-step pages, 10 to 30 minutes for search flows and checkouts, and hours or days for accounts (where static ISP proxies are usually better). Longer sessions risk the underlying residential device going offline.

Should I rotate my IP on every request?

For independent pages, yes; it spreads load and keeps per-IP rates low. For anything involving cookies, logins, carts or multi-step flows, use sticky sessions instead.

Can I share the best proxies across my team?

Yes, but give each person or job its own sub-user or credentials. That lets you track cost, set limits and revoke access without disrupting everyone else.

Do the best proxies work with VPNs?

You can run both, but it adds complexity and latency, and it's rarely needed. For automation, use proxies alone. For personal privacy, a VPN alone is usually simpler. See proxy vs VPN.

What's the best proxy protocol?

HTTP proxies for web traffic, because they are universally supported. SOCKS5 for non-web apps, games and tools that need it, and for DNS resolution through the proxy. The best proxy providers support both. See SOCKS5 proxies.

Do I need IPv6 proxies?

Only if your target supports IPv6 and doesn't penalise IPv6 ranges. They are very cheap and plentiful, but many sites don't support IPv6. For most buyers, the best proxies are still IPv4. See IPv6 proxies.

How do I keep my best proxies from getting banned?

Use the right proxy type, pace requests per IP, match browser locale to the proxy location, fix fingerprint leaks, rotate or retire flagged IPs quickly, and keep account IPs separate from scraping IPs. See avoid IP bans when scraping.

Why do my proxies work in a browser but not in my script?

Usually because your script's TLS fingerprint, headers or behaviour look automated, while the browser looks real. Try a headless browser, a browser-impersonating HTTP library, or better headers, before blaming the proxy.

Why do my proxies work in my script but not in Chrome?

Chrome doesn't accept proxy credentials on the command line. Use IP allowlisting, a proxy extension, or your automation tool's authentication method. Also check for WebRTC leaks. See browser proxy settings.

Can the best proxies get around CAPTCHAs?

Good proxies reduce how often you see CAPTCHAs, because trusted IPs get challenged less. They don't solve CAPTCHAs. If you still see many, slow down, improve your fingerprint, or consider a web unblocker. See CAPTCHAs and proxies.

What is the best way to compare two providers fairly?

Run the same code, from the same machine, at the same time, against the same targets, with the same concurrency, changing only the proxy. Measure success rate, median and p95 latency, bandwidth per success, and errors. The benchmark section on this page has a script to start from.

Should I buy proxies monthly or annually?

Monthly or pay-as-you-go, at least at first. The market changes quickly, and annual commitments lock you in before you know whether a provider stays the best proxy option for you. Consider longer terms only after months of stable results, and only with good discounts.

What happens if my best proxy provider goes down?

If you keep a backup provider configured and tested, you switch your configuration and carry on. Without one, you wait. That's why we recommend a small, warm backup for anything that matters.

Are residential proxies safe for the people whose IPs are used?

With ethically sourced networks, participants have agreed to share their connection, usually in exchange for payment or an app feature, and the provider limits what traffic is allowed. Ask each provider how consent works. See ethically sourced proxies.

Can I use the best proxies for gaming?

Proxies can sometimes help reach a game server in another region or route around a poor network path, but they rarely reduce ping, and many games ban proxy and VPN use. Read the game's terms first. See best proxies for gaming.

What are the best proxies for AI training data collection?

Rotating datacenter proxies for the open web, rotating residential for protected sources, and unlimited residential plans once volume is high and steady. Keep records of what you collected, from where and when. See AI training data proxies.

Do the best proxies hide my identity completely?

No. A proxy hides your IP address from the target. Your browser fingerprint, cookies, logins and behaviour can still identify you. For real anonymity you need much more than a proxy.

Is Geonode or Webshare the best proxy provider?

It depends on the job. Webshare is the stronger pick for free proxies and cheap datacenter lists; Geonode is the stronger pick for non-expiring residential bandwidth, multiple proxy types under one account and unlimited residential plans. Many buyers use both. See Webshare vs Geonode.

How often do the best proxies change?

Rankings shift every few months as providers change prices, pools and products and as targets update their defences. Re-test your setup at least quarterly.

What's the best proxy for checking ads in other countries?

Residential or mobile proxies with country or city targeting, used with a matching browser locale and, for mobile ads, a mobile user agent and viewport. See ad verification proxies.

Can I resell the best proxies I buy?

Only if your provider's terms allow it; many prohibit reselling or require a reseller agreement. See how to become a proxy reseller and proxy resellers and marketplaces.

Are proxy marketplaces a good place to find the best proxies?

They can be cheap, but you often don't know the original source, support is limited, and quality varies widely. For anything important, buy directly from a provider you can test and contact. See proxy resellers and marketplaces.

What is the best proxy setup for monitoring my own website?

Datacenter proxies in each region you care about are usually enough for uptime and content checks. Use residential proxies if you need to see exactly what consumers in a country see, for example to test geo-blocking or CDN behaviour. See Geonode for website monitoring and Webshare for website monitoring.

Should I run my own proxy server instead of buying?

A self-hosted proxy on a VPS gives you one or a few datacenter IPs you fully control. It's great for learning, for a fixed IP you can allowlist, or for routing your own traffic. It won't give you residential trust or large pools. See self-hosted Squid proxy.

What is the best way to learn more after reading this guide?

Pick the guide closest to your next decision: how to choose a proxy provider for shortlisting, how to test proxies before buying for benchmarking, proxy buying mistakes for what to avoid, and the proxy glossary for any term you don't recognise.

What are the best proxies for a small team on a tight budget?

A cheap datacenter list for the easy targets and a small, non-expiring residential balance for the hard ones covers most small-team work for very little. Give each team member a sub-user so you can see who uses what. See Webshare for small teams and Webshare vs Geonode for small budgets.

Which rotation settings make the best proxies perform best?

Rotate per request for independent pages, use sticky sessions of a few minutes for multi-step flows, and use static IPs for identities. Most success-rate problems we see come from using one rotation setting for every job. See Webshare vs Geonode rotation.

Does the size of a provider's IP pool matter for the best proxies?

Only in the countries you need, and only if the IPs are live and clean. Test unique IPs per 1,000 rotating requests in your key countries rather than trusting the headline figure. See Webshare vs Geonode IP pool and coverage.

Do the best proxies support SOCKS5 as well as HTTP?

Most good providers support both on the same plan, but check for the proxy type you're buying, because some products are HTTP only. See Webshare vs Geonode protocols and SOCKS5.

What refund terms should I expect from the best proxy providers?

Usually a short window of a few days and a cap on how much traffic you can have used. Read the conditions before you test, and stay inside them if you might need a refund. See Webshare vs Geonode billing and refunds.

Can the best proxies for small buyers also work at enterprise scale?

Sometimes. Self-serve providers can handle large volumes, but enterprises often need contracts, SLAs, invoicing and compliance documentation that self-serve plans don't include. See Webshare vs Geonode for enterprise scale and enterprise proxy providers.

Which authentication method do the best proxies use?

Both username and password and IP allowlisting. Use credentials for scripts and laptops, and allowlisting for fixed servers and tools that can't send credentials, such as Chrome launched by Selenium. See Webshare vs Geonode authentication.

Are the best proxies for Playwright and Selenium the same?

The proxy types are the same (sticky residential or static ISP), but the setup differs. Playwright accepts credentials per browser context, while Chrome under Selenium usually needs IP allowlisting or a helper for authentication. See Webshare vs Geonode for Playwright and Webshare vs Geonode for Selenium.

What are the best proxies for Node.js scrapers?

A rotating gateway used through a proxy agent such as undici's ProxyAgent or https-proxy-agent, with sticky sessions when a flow needs cookies. See Webshare vs Geonode for Node.js.

Sources and further reading

Independent references that back up the points above, from standards bodies, governments, universities and non-profits. They open in a new tab.

• Internet service provider (Wikipedia): What an ISP is, the companies whose address space ISP and residential proxies use.
• Automated Threats to Web Applications (OWASP): OWASP's catalogue of automated threats, including scraping and scalping, as site owners see them.
• RFC 6598: Shared Address Space for Carrier-Grade NAT (IETF / RFC Editor): Explains the shared address space carriers use for CGNAT, the reason many phones share one mobile IP.
• Facts and Figures 2024 (International Telecommunication Union): The UN's figures on how many people are online and on mobile networks.
• RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (IETF / RFC Editor): The current TCP specification, the transport under HTTP and SOCKS proxies.