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 a Geonode affiliate, which we disclose on every page, and we cover Geonode 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. 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.

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.