Best Proxy Service in 2026: Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ThorData, IPRoyal and NetNut Compared

The best proxy service for a difficult scraping job is Bright Data when you need managed unblocking; for a small residential crawler, start with Decodo. This comparison covers 7 providers, including Webshare for cheap datacenter access and a procurement hold on NetNut. Choose the best proxy service provider by the work it replaces: IP access, managed unblocking or extraction.

For enterprise residential evaluation, shortlist Oxylabs. ThorData deserves a budget pilot, while IPRoyal makes more sense when unused residential traffic must remain available between jobs.

A proxy forwards your application's requests through another IP address. For personal privacy or streaming, evaluate a VPN instead; this page is for scraping, price monitoring, ad verification and agent data collection.

Pricing and access policies verified against vendor pages on 10 November 2026. These are buying recommendations based on documented offers and technical fit, not measured speed rankings or claims of hands-on testing.

Best Proxy Service at a Glance

Buy the least expensive network that returns the correct data from your permitted targets. The smallest paid residential offer is shown below, alongside the datacenter alternative; a bulk headline rate is not an entry price. PAYG means pay as you go; KYC means Know Your Customer, a review of the buyer and intended use.

Prices are USD as displayed, before applicable tax. Bright Data's residential discount uses RESIGB50; ThorData's entry offer is also discounted. Datacenter offers differ in sharing, bandwidth and billing period, so their per-IP prices are not interchangeable. Each provider section links the source and explains the catch.

How These Were Picked

The ranking favors fit for a production data job, with separate recommendations for buyers who already operate a crawler and buyers who need the provider to handle access failures.

The criteria are concrete: available proxy types, smallest paid commitment, session control, onboarding restrictions, clarity of sourcing, and what remains your engineering responsibility. A provider that publishes a huge pool still needs to return usable addresses in your target geography. An attractive trial still needs to permit your actual use case.

The comparison covers the seven named services because they represent distinct purchasing choices. It does not rank their advertised success percentages against one another: without the same targets, request mix, geography and measurement method, those figures do not establish a winner. Pool sizes below are vendor claims, not counts of simultaneously available addresses.

The verification exposed three buying issues that deserve more weight than a logo wall: Bright Data's residential eligibility is stricter than a trial button suggests; ThorData's trial and KYC descriptions disagree; and NetNut's legacy domain no longer presents an ordinary buying page. Those issues affect whether you can launch, not merely what you pay.

Residential, Datacenter, ISP or Mobile?

Start with datacenter for an ordinary public-page crawler, and pay for residential only when the target or geography justifies it. Changing the network should solve an observed problem, not serve as a default upgrade.

Datacenter proxies use addresses from hosting infrastructure. They are the economical starting point for a catalog crawler whose permitted targets accept them. The wall is recognition: a site can identify hosting-network addresses, so buying more of the same type may not improve access.

Residential proxies route through consumer internet connections. They are useful for checking local retail prices or ad delivery from a consumer network. You pay for transferred data and depend on an available exit connection, so narrow location filters and long browser sessions deserve particular attention during a pilot.

ISP proxies, often called static residential proxies, pair ISP-registered addresses with hosted infrastructure. They are the candidate for a stable identity across a long permitted workflow. Ask whether the address is dedicated or shared and how replacements work. “Residential” in the product name does not mean a household device stays online for you.

Mobile proxies use cellular-carrier connectivity. Choose them when the observation specifically needs a mobile network, such as carrier-dependent ad delivery. A mobile IP does not turn a desktop browser into a phone: browser settings, page layout and network origin remain separate parts of your test.

The vendors' proxy-type comparison and residential-network explanation describe these underlying distinctions. The buying rule is to test the least costly suitable type on your actual target mix.

Rotating versus sticky sessions

Rotate between independent requests; keep a sticky session through a connected sequence. Rotation changes the exit address, while a sticky session asks the provider to retain one address for a period or workflow.

For independent product pages, changing addresses between requests may be fine. For a permitted session that selects a store, opens a product and checks delivery availability, changing IP halfway through can change the location context. Keep the session's cookies and proxy identity together.

Sticky does not mean permanent. A residential peer can disappear, and a provider's retention setting is not a promise that the underlying connection will remain available. Decide whether to restart the whole sequence when its identity changes. For a workflow that cannot tolerate that interruption, evaluate a static ISP product.

The second choice is who owns the recovery work. A raw proxy supplies network access. Your crawler still handles retries, parsing and page validation. An unblocker handles more of the access problem; a scraping API may also extract the data. Choose that boundary before comparing bills.

The Providers, Compared

1. Bright Data: best for managed unblocking

Bright Data is a proxy and web-data platform whose strongest fit here is a crawler that spends too much engineering time recovering from blocked pages. Its Web Unlocker handles CAPTCHA challenges and automated retries, while the broader platform offers residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile access. The distinction matters: buying raw residential bandwidth does not automatically buy the same managed behavior.

For a price-monitoring product that must cover difficult retailers, put the managed option on the shortlist first. Your team can concentrate on validating product identifiers, currencies and availability rather than maintaining every access workaround itself. For an easy public directory that already accepts datacenter traffic, this broader platform is less compelling.

Best for: Builders with difficult scraping targets and a reason to outsource unblocking.
Standout: Managed access handling alongside multiple raw proxy networks.
Pricing: Residential PAYG is $4/GB with RESIGB50, against $8 standard, on the proxy pricing page; managed products have separate billing.
Free trial: Do not treat the residential trial button as immediate residential access. The current access policy requires funding and approved company KYC.

The eligibility wall is unusually important. New residential access is limited to registered companies with a corporate email and human-reviewed approval. The residential network-access policy explicitly says KYC cannot begin in Playground or Limited Trial modes. It lists ISP, datacenter and Web Unlocker as alternatives that do not require that residential KYC.

That makes Bright Data a poor raw-residential recommendation for an individual using a personal email. It can still be a relevant managed-unblocking candidate. Do not build an onboarding deadline around assumptions borrowed from a different product in its catalog.

Its product overview also distinguishes Scraping Browser, which works with Puppeteer and Playwright, from Web Unlocker. Pick a browser when you need browser-driven interaction; pick an access API when you mainly need the page returned. Our Bright Data review covers that broader choice.

Verdict: Bright Data earns the top slot for difficult scraping because it offers a way to buy access handling, not because its residential rate guarantees better results.

1. 1

   Choose the product boundary

   Write down whether your job needs raw network access, a returned page, or browser interaction. Match that requirement to proxies, Web Unlocker or Scraping Browser before buying traffic.

2. 2

   Clear eligibility before integration

   For residential access, use a registered-company account, add the required funds and submit the company/use-case documents. Confirm approval in the control panel before scheduling a production launch.

3. 3

   Pilot a representative target set

   Use your real permitted domains and locations. Include pages with variants, missing prices and out-of-stock items so you test the data your business will receive.

4. 4

   Compare completed records

   Record transfer usage, failed attempts and validated output. Keep managed unblocking only where the reduction in recovery work justifies its own bill.

2. Oxylabs: best for enterprise residential evaluation

Oxylabs is a proxy and scraping platform worth evaluating when residential collection must pass both an engineering review and a vendor review. Its residential product describes a large ISP-assigned pool, targeting controls and session options; its catalog also covers mobile, ISP and datacenter products. The buying advantage is a documented set of procurement and network controls, not an automatic assurance that every target works.

Imagine a retail intelligence team collecting from several countries with distinct data owners and approval requirements. It needs to specify permitted targets, verify the sourcing story and know what happens when a use case changes. Oxylabs makes those questions part of the buying process rather than treating signup as the whole relationship.

Best for: Enterprise teams evaluating residential collection and vendor governance together.
Standout: Explicit customer screening and a broad network catalog.
Pricing: Residential starts at $6/GB on the $15/month Starter subscription in the current pricing table.
Free trial: A one-time $5 welcome credit is advertised for new accounts; customer KYC still applies.

The company states that every customer must complete a questionnaire under its KYC policy. That is not the same as saying every buyer must upload a passport, nor does a welcome credit override review. A legitimate project can still need clarification before the vendor approves it.

The residential product page claims a pool of 175M+ IPs. Treat that as a network-scale claim, not an allocation to your account. For a narrow city-and-network requirement, ask how much usable supply remains after those filters. The broad count tells you little about repeated availability in a small region.

There is also a page-level pricing mismatch: the residential FAQ mentions a higher monthly starting amount, while the current pricing table shows Starter at the lower amount quoted above. This comparison follows the table. Confirm the product and allowance at checkout instead of translating a rounded allowance into a promise of exact usable bandwidth.

Verdict: Choose Oxylabs for a structured enterprise evaluation. Keep the final decision tied to your target geography and validated output, not the pool headline.

3. Decodo: best for a small residential crawler

Decodo is a proxy provider with a low-commitment residential subscription and practical location and session controls. Its entry offer makes it a sensible first pilot for a builder who already has a crawler and wants to test consumer-network access without a large monthly commitment.

A small retailer monitoring competitors in selected markets is a good example. Country targeting may be enough at first; city or ZIP targeting becomes useful only when the storefront changes its offer by location. Decodo includes targeting options rather than forcing the buyer to equate a basic plan with a different residential pool.

Best for: Small recurring scraping jobs that need residential addresses.
Standout: Country, state, city, ZIP and ASN (network-organization) targeting with rotating or sticky sessions.
Pricing: $3.75/GB in the 3GB subscription, $11.25/month plus VAT; PAYG is $4/GB on the residential pricing page.
Free trial: New users get 3 days and 100MB; the chosen paid plan activates afterward unless canceled.

The trial is useful for proving authentication and checking representative pages. It is not evidence that your entire monthly workload will fit, nor should it be treated as an open-ended free account. Decodo also says its money-back option does not apply when you use this trial. Set the decision date before starting it.

Its catalog includes residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile options. The datacenter product page describes both bandwidth-priced and per-IP choices. If your target works through datacenter IPs, compare those first; a low residential commitment is still an unnecessary expense when you do not need residential routing.

Decodo's pricing page advertises a 115M+ residential pool and full pool access across plans. That is useful as a plan distinction, but not a reason to load every available targeting filter. Narrowing to a specific ASN, the network organization associated with an address, can make sense for a network-specific observation. Otherwise it makes your availability requirement harder without improving the answer.

Verdict: Decodo is the most straightforward starting shortlist choice for a small recurring residential crawler. Switch the recommendation to datacenter when that cheaper network already returns the required data.

4. Webshare: best for inexpensive datacenter access

Webshare is the first service to consider when you need a cheap datacenter pool and already own the scraping logic. Its shared Proxy Server offer is inexpensive enough to test network fit before committing to a more costly residential product. The central limitation is equally clear: a low price for shared hosting IPs cannot make them look like household connections.

For an inventory monitor reading permitted pages from sites that accept hosting-network traffic, this is a sensible starting point. For a location-sensitive retail check that specifically needs a consumer exit, use a residential pilot instead. The task decides the network, not the cheapest number on the page.

Best for: Budget datacenter crawling and proxy-configuration experiments.
Standout: A persistent free datacenter plan rather than only a timed trial.
Pricing: Shared datacenter starts at $2.99/month for 100 proxies, or $0.0299/IP, on Webshare's pricing page.
Free trial: The free plan provides 10 datacenter proxies and 1GB of bandwidth; it is not a residential trial.

Webshare also sells static residential and rotating residential products. Its rotating residential offer starts with 1GB for $3.50/month and supports HTTP/SOCKS5. That gives you an alternative inside the same catalog, but it is a separate product and a separate capacity decision.

The shared datacenter entry plan should not be compared directly with a dedicated per-IP quote elsewhere. Shared addresses expose your workload to the reputation of a shared resource. Dedicated addresses can isolate that aspect, but still remain recognizable as their network type. Neither arrangement removes the need to respect the target's access rules.

Verification is conditional. Webshare's account-verification explanation describes use-case and payment checks that can request identity or business details. It also says access may be limited during review. “No card needed for free signup” should never be translated into “no verification under any circumstances.”

Verdict: Start with Webshare when datacenter is technically sufficient. Move to another network type because the target requires it, not because a bigger package sounds more professional.

5. ThorData: best for a low-entry residential price pilot

ThorData is a proxy and scraping-services provider with an attractive small residential offer. It belongs on a budget shortlist because the displayed entry purchase is small, and its residential product includes location targeting plus rotating and sticky sessions. It does not earn a reliability crown from that price.

A builder with an existing price-monitoring crawler can use a small purchase to compare the same permitted target set against Decodo or Webshare residential. Keep the country, session behavior and page mix consistent. If one service returns the wrong store, a challenge page or a stale product variant, the lower bandwidth rate has not bought a better result.

Best for: Budget-conscious builders prepared to validate a residential pool themselves.
Standout: A small displayed entry purchase with country, city, state and continent targeting.
Pricing: The current price list shows 1GB at $2/GB, discounted from $2.85; the headline bulk rate is not this entry offer.
Free trial: A solutions page advertises 100MB on signup, but its no-KYC wording conflicts with the vendor's general review policy.

ThorData claims 100M+ residential IPs across 190+ locations. That is broad potential coverage, not proof that the addresses delivered to your specific job are available, diverse or accepted. Its catalog also lists mobile, ISP and datacenter products. Choose a different type only after identifying which network characteristic the job needs.

The catch is onboarding clarity. The alternative-data FAQ says the signup traffic needs no KYC. The KYC policy says all new users undergo compliance review and potential clients submit their intended use case before gaining access. Those statements should not be silently combined into a guarantee.

Treat the signup allowance as an advertised offer, and ask support to confirm the current allowance, expiry, eligible targets and approval requirement in writing. If a trial is time-critical, use a provider whose published terms already answer those questions. This is a purchasing limitation, not evidence that the underlying network is poor.

Verdict: ThorData earns a controlled budget pilot, not a blanket production recommendation. Expand only after its written access terms and your completed-record results are satisfactory.

6. IPRoyal: best when residential traffic is used unevenly

IPRoyal is a proxy provider whose non-expiring residential traffic is more useful than its bulk headline rate for many small buyers. If you collect data during occasional research projects rather than continuously, keeping unused traffic available can matter more than minimizing a subscription's nominal per-GB cost.

Picture an agency that checks local pricing around a client's seasonal launch, then pauses the job. A recurring allowance can be a poor fit if most of it sits unused. IPRoyal's PAYG route addresses that purchasing pattern, though the smallest purchase is not the cheapest residential entry in this comparison.

Best for: Intermittent residential collection with gaps between jobs.
Standout: Residential traffic that does not expire.
Pricing: The residential pricing page lists 1GB at $7 with a subscription or $7.35 PAYG.
Free trial: The residential product advertises a trial button, but the page read does not specify its allowance or duration; confirm terms rather than budgeting on a free entitlement.

The distinction between entry and bulk pricing is substantial. Its low headline rate requires a very large order. Do not buy unused capacity merely to lower the unit price on paper. Non-expiring traffic helps with timing, but cash tied up in a large balance is still cash you cannot spend elsewhere.

The product catalog also includes ISP, datacenter and mobile products. Its datacenter “from” price depends on the purchase term, so it is not directly comparable with a provider's monthly shared-IP rate. Confirm duration, bandwidth and exclusivity before deciding which quote is cheaper.

Residential controls include manual IP changes and rotating or sticky sessions. For a sequence of related pages, preserve the session. For independent pages, rotation may be suitable. The flexibility is useful, but your crawler still needs to detect a failed session and restart or stop safely.

Identity checks affect functionality. IPRoyal's KYC policy says verification begins at registration and identity verification enables unrestricted access. A successful signup is not proof that every target, pool or feature is open to the account.

Verdict: Choose IPRoyal for the way you consume traffic, not as the cheapest tiny residential purchase. The non-expiry benefit must outweigh its entry-rate premium for your workload.

7. NetNut: hold new production procurement

NetNut is an enterprise-positioned proxy brand that requires a different evaluation today. The legacy .io buying path returned a seizure notice during this verification, while a NetNut-branded .ai site now advertises residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile access. That combination warrants a continuity check before a new production commitment.

The point is not to infer guilt from a notice or claim that every endpoint is offline. It is to avoid treating an old review's signup path, trial terms and sourcing description as current purchasing evidence. A new branded website alone does not answer all of those questions.

Best for: An enterprise procurement review only, pending confirmation of operating and contractual continuity.
Standout: The .ai site describes an enterprise catalog with proxy and data-access products.
Pricing: Request a written entry quote from the .ai pricing page; a current per-GB rate could not be confirmed in the final source check.
Free trial: The homepage advertises no-card signup, but the pages read do not establish a trial allowance, duration or current KYC requirement.

The .io residential address returned a page titled “Seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation” on the verification date. The .ai product page describes session and targeting controls, but those marketing claims do not verify the corporate relationship, the current sourcing chain or the service delivered to a paying account.

Before a pilot, obtain the contracting entity, current acceptable-use terms, IP-sourcing evidence, KYC requirements and a written explanation of the domain transition. Validate the authorized endpoint separately from the website. Keep an exportable configuration so an integration does not depend on one vendor's dashboard.

Verdict: Keep NetNut out of a new production shortlist until procurement resolves those questions. Oxylabs is the cleaner enterprise evaluation starting point in this comparison.

Choose the Best Proxy Service Provider for Your Job

The decision flips when the expensive part changes from bandwidth to recovery work. A team with a working crawler and simple targets should favor raw network economics. A team maintaining fragile access logic should compare an unblocker or scraping API against the cost of that maintenance.

Best residential proxy service

Start with Decodo for a small recurring job. Put Oxylabs beside it when the procurement process and enterprise requirements matter more than the smallest commitment. Add ThorData when minimizing entry spend is important and you can resolve its trial/KYC wording before relying on it.

Use IPRoyal when collection is intermittent enough that non-expiring traffic changes the buying decision. A larger advertised pool is not the tie-breaker; correct location, completed records and session stability are.

Best premium proxy service

Bright Data is the premium shortlist choice when you need managed access handling. Paying more is justified only if it removes work your team otherwise owns. If a raw datacenter pool already returns valid pages, a richer platform can add cost without improving the result.

For an agent that needs readable page content or structured records, raw proxies may be the wrong product category. Compare the best web scraping tools and Firecrawl alternatives before building an extraction layer yourself.

Best free proxy service

Webshare's free datacenter plan is the practical starting point for learning authentication and checking basic target compatibility. It is not a free residential network and does not prove production reliability.

Avoid anonymous public proxy lists for a business crawler. Without a clear operator, acceptable-use policy and sourcing explanation, you cannot make a defensible vendor decision or plan around continuity. A named vendor's limited free offer is a different proposition.

Best SOCKS5 proxy service

Choose the network type first, then verify protocol support. SOCKS5 is a way for your application to communicate through a proxy, not a claim that the exit is residential or resistant to blocking.

Decodo and Webshare explicitly list SOCKS5 support in the offers examined here. For a browser or scraping library, confirm its authentication and DNS behavior before buying a large package. A protocol mismatch is an integration issue, not something a larger IP pool fixes.

Best US proxy service

For US price monitoring, choose the location granularity the business question requires. A national price comparison may need country targeting; a local grocery or delivery comparison may need a specific store context as well as a regional IP.

Decodo, Webshare residential and ThorData offer geographical controls, but the location setting alone is not your validation. Confirm the returned page's store, currency, availability and delivery region. If the storefront uses a cookie or explicit store selector, retain that state throughout the session.

Terms, KYC and Where the IPs Come From

A vendor's sourcing statement is a claim to verify, not a substitute for consent evidence. KYC, short for Know Your Customer, screens the buyer and use case. It does not itself prove how every residential address entered the pool.

Bright Data says its residential peers opt in. Oxylabs says participants are informed, consenting and compensated. Decodo's sourcing and compliance explanation describes verified partner networks, explicit consent and rewards, plus additional customer KYC when needed.

Webshare says its residential pool comes from selected partners that meet its stated ethics and compliance requirements. ThorData's sourcing explanation names paid direct participants and resold partner IPs. IPRoyal describes Pawns.app opt-in bandwidth sharing as a sourcing channel. A detailed current sourcing chain was not verified for the NetNut-branded .ai offer.

For procurement, ask how consent is recorded, how a participant leaves the network, how suppliers are checked and how abuse reports are handled. Ask those questions about the actual product you will use, not merely the company as a whole.

For your own collection, respect site terms, permission boundaries and rate limits. Public visibility does not grant unlimited rights to collect, retain or republish data. Keep personal data out of the job unless there is an appropriate basis to process it, and get a use-case review for sensitive or regulated work.

The Ones to Avoid

Avoid the wrong offer for the job, even when the provider is otherwise credible.

Avoid Bright Data raw residential access when you are an unregistered individual with only a personal email. Its current eligibility rules rule out that buying path; consider a suitable alternative product instead.

Avoid IPRoyal's bulk headline rate as the basis for a tiny-project budget. Its strongest reason to buy is non-expiring traffic, not the cheapest entry purchase.

Avoid ThorData as a guaranteed no-KYC trial until its conflicting policy statements are resolved for your account. A written answer is more useful than picking the more convenient sentence.

Avoid NetNut for a new production dependency while corporate continuity, contract, sourcing and access rules remain unverified. This is a procurement hold, not a claim that a notice proves wrongdoing.

Avoid untraceable free proxy lists when you need a supplier you can hold accountable. Cheap access without a responsible operator is a poor foundation for a customer-facing data product.

Frequently Asked Questions

Residential vs datacenter proxies: which should you use?

Use datacenter proxies when they return the required data from your permitted targets. Use residential proxies when consumer-network origin or location materially affects access or the observation. Datacenter is usually the economical starting point; neither type guarantees that a website accepts your requests.

Are proxies legal?

Proxy technology has legitimate uses, but a proxy subscription does not authorize a particular scraping project. The answer depends on the jurisdiction, access method, data collected, permissions and target terms. Check those conditions and the provider's acceptable-use rules; seek legal advice when the use case is sensitive or uncertain.

What is the cheapest reliable proxy?

Webshare is the first low-cost datacenter candidate in this comparison. ThorData has a low displayed residential entry price, but its onboarding terms need clarification. Reliability must be established on your targets: compare validated records, location accuracy, session completion and support, rather than declaring a winner from a per-GB price alone.

Make the Pilot Decide

Run a small, representative job before committing to a large balance. Pick an easy target, a difficult target and a location-sensitive target from the work you are permitted to do. Keep the extraction logic and required output the same across vendors.

Count a record only after checking the product identity, relevant price, currency, location and freshness. A success response that contains a challenge, the wrong variant or stale data is a failed business result.

Record the proxy bill, retry traffic and time spent repairing the job. Compare cost per validated record alongside session failures and delivery time. Keep the simplest service that satisfies your data and procurement requirements; upgrade only when the pilot shows which limitation you need to remove.

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