12 Best Residential Proxy Service Providers

As AIMultiple’s CTO, I lead data collection from thousands of websites and run a residential proxy benchmark, including a load test with 100,000 parallel requests. See the top solutions based on our tests and follow the links to learn more from these vendors:

Vendor

For

1

Bright Data

Enterprise users looking for compliance and advanced features

2

Decodo

Affordable proxy plans with minimal interaction

3

Oxylabs

For a stable residential proxy infrastructure for high volume requests

4

Webshare

The lowest cost static residential proxies

5

ProxyScrape

Lowest starter pricing

Show More (5)

Not all residential proxies are equal:

• Response times differ.
• Though vendors claim ~0.1% error rates, high-traffic websites can frequently block residential proxies. However, actual blocking rates depend on multiple factors, as outlined in proxy server success rates.

Residential proxy cost calculator

Enter GBs to compare costs for different residential proxy providers:

Residential proxy provider benchmark

See residential proxy providers’ median response times and success rate in our benchmark. The ranges below show the 95% confidence interval for the response times:

The graphs above show the success rate performance of various data collection vendors based on automated tests run every 10 minutes.

In each run, a randomly selected target URL (e.g., Google, Bing, Yandex, Yahoo) is accessed simultaneously by all vendors. The success of each request is evaluated by checking for specific content in the returned HTML.

Requests that load the target content within 30 seconds are marked as successful. The success rate is calculated daily as the percentage of successful requests out of the total number of attempts.

See the methodology for calculating these response times.

Residential proxy features

See below the top residential proxy providers in terms of features like:

Table features explained:

• Rating from the top 2 B2B review platforms.
• Unblocker: Web unblockers offer a mechanism to bypass anti-scraping technologies employed by websites.
• City-level targeting: The ability to select a proxy server located in a specific city.

Success rates

We don’t report proxies’ success rates by brand since they depend on multiple factors, such as the time of crawl and proxy configurations. For more details, see proxy provider success rates.

If you want to use tens of thousands of residential proxies, then response rates will differ by brand. Our high-scale web scraping benchmark shows which brands have a more stable residential proxy infrastructure.

If you are having low success rates, you either need to:

• Vary your crawling approach and try different configurations or
• Use unblockers or web scraping APIs that enable users to access websites easily without working on proxy configuration.

What is the price of residential proxy services?

Sorting: Ascending orders based on the lowest price level, except for sponsors with website links.

* *Per GB price with pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing.

** Refers to the minimum cost of a residential proxy service.

Price comparison for top residential proxies

The following graph illustrates the prices for different residential proxy providers. For further details, see our benchmark pricing strategy.

Though residential proxies are expensive, they are necessary for many websites that rely on anti-scraping measures. For easier-to-scrape websites, you can rely on datacenter proxies.

Best Residential Proxy Providers: Performance and Features

Bright Data

Bright Data’s residential proxies use a default IP rotation setup, and the rotation frequency is per request. If you need more control over IP rotation, Bright Data offers several options for managing it (see IP rotation). There are no bandwidth limitations.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, city, ASN, and Zip code level targeting.
• Shared and dedicated: You can opt for shared or dedicated residential IP addresses.
• IP rotation: Session control (each unique session ID is assigned a unique IP), directing requests to specific IPs (for zones with dedicated residential proxies, specific parameters through a particular IP address), constant IP binding (the same IP is used for the duration of the session).

Insights from benchmarking and user experience

Each residential proxy’s pros and cons are derived from our experience during benchmarking or user reviews. All of these points are either validated based on our experience, or they are about customer support, which is a topic where every user can have a different experience:

Pros:

• Bright Data is among the most resilient residential proxy networks.
• The support team provides timely assistance and resolves issues efficiently. We experienced this with AIMultiple accounts, and when we signed up under different domains to test their responsiveness.

Cons:

• As the largest residential proxy provider by number of employees, most of its revenues likely come from enterprises or large startups. As a result, the product is feature-rich. New users need some time to familiarize themselves, and proficiency requires hands-on experience.

Decodo

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) offers a rotating residential proxy pool with global country coverage. ZIP code-level targeting is available only in the US. Decodo’s residential proxies can rotate with every connection request to the target server, and you can also customize the IP rotation settings.

Key features:

• Geo targeting: Country, city, US states, and zip code level targeting.
• Dedicated & shared residential IPs
• IP rotation: Residential proxies support two session types: sticky sessions (24 hours) and rotating sessions (each new request).

Pros:

• Decodo features an intuitive dashboard and integration tools with residential solutions like an anti-detect browser.
• The provider offers granular scaling with their pricing plans. You can buy just 2 GB or 8 GB, without overcommitting.

Cons:

• The free trial period may be insufficient; they offer a 3-day free trial with 100MB of residential proxy traffic.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers shared residential proxies. Residential IPs are assigned based on entry nodes or any parameters you set. Applying granular targeting with residential proxies is free.

Residential proxy servers rotate IP addresses by default with each new request. If you need to keep the same IP for a more extended period, there are two options: session ID (up to 10 minutes) and session time (up to 30 minutes).

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, city, and state-level
• IP rotation: Assigns a different residential IP with each request and allows users to customize the desired length of the session to maintain the same IP (up to 30 mins).

Use the 7-day free trial to test Oxylabs’ services.

Pros:

• It is among the best residential proxy networks for large-scale web data collection.

Webshare

Webshare has restricted targeting choices and lacks custom rotation features but is friendly to beginners with a simple UI.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country level.
• IP rotation: For every 5 minutes, you can customize the rotation duration.
• Pricing: minimum package at $7 for 1 GB

Pros:

• Webshare focuses on smaller companies compared to other providers and provides a simpler, user-friendly interface.

Cons:

• Customer support is not accessible 24/7.
• Lacks ASN or ZIP code level targeting options.
• Lacks a flexible pay-as-you-go package.

ProxyScrape

ProxyScrape provides a shared residential pool that rotates for each connection request. ProxyScrape’s residential proxies support both HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols.

ProxyScrape does not offer a free trial for residential proxies, but you can test the service at a low cost. The proxy provider guarantees a refund if you use less than 1 GB of data and are unsatisfied within 3 days of purchase.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Support country, state, and city-level targeting
• Shared IPs: Offers a shared residential proxy pool
• IP rotation: Change with each new connection

NodeMaven

NodeMaven offers residential proxies to small- and medium-sized businesses, marketers, and sneaker bots.

NodeMaven’s residential proxy network covers over 150 countries and 1,400 cities, providing country, city, and region-level targeting.

They emphasize the quality of their proxies in their claims, which include:

• A proprietary IP quality filter to ensure that users receive only high-quality IPs
• Sticky sessions up to 24 hours

We’ll soon be testing these in an update of our proxy benchmark.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, region, city, and ISP
• Shared IPs: Shared
• IP rotation: Up to 24-hour sticky sessions, IP rotation for each request

Pricing details:

• Traffic rollover: Unused traffic rolls over to the next period in subscriptions
• Minimum package price: €6/GB
• Free trial: Paid trial plan for €3.99

Pros:

• Sticky residential proxies keep the same IP address for up to 24 hours.

Cons:

• NodeMaven offers only a paid trial (500 MB for €3.99), which may be less appealing than competitors’ fully free trials.

DataImpulse

DataImpulse’s residential proxies start at $1 per GB, making them one of the most affordable options in the market. These proxies allow users to target specific countries, cities, and ASNs, with the flexibility to choose multiple locations or ASNs simultaneously.

For enterprise-level needs, DataImpulse offers a premium residential proxy pool, which includes a dedicated account manager and tailored API endpoints designed to meet specific use cases.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Countries, states, cities, zip codes, or ASNs
• Shared IPs: Shared
• IP rotation: Up to 120 mins, IP rotation for each request

Pricing details:

• Minimum package price: $5 for 5 GB ($1/GB)
• 5GB for $5 to test the service

NetNut

NetNut provides shared residential proxies with precise targeting options. The provider offers U.S. city and state-level proxy targeting.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, city, and state
• Dedicated IP pool: Shared residential proxies
• IP rotation: Every request

You can get started as a business with a 7-day trial.

Cons:

• Experienced increased failure rates during our web data collection load test.

Nimble

Nimble offers rotating residential proxies that support different configuration options for IP replacement:

• Replace IP when unavailable: Automatically swaps in a new IP if the sticky IP drops or becomes unavailable.
• Select another IP within the same ASN: This replaces the failed IP with another from the same Autonomous System Number (ISP network), keeping the network profile similar.
• Do not replace – Fail request: If the sticky IP becomes unavailable, the system fails the request instead of replacing the IP.

Expand Image

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country and state
• Dedicated IPs: Private residential proxies
• IP rotation: Residential proxies that automatically change IP addresses as a default feature, and offer sticky sessions that rotate after 10 minutes without activity.

Pricing details:

• Minimum package price: $150/month includes residential proxies and scraping API
• 7-day free trial

IPRoyal

IPRoyal offers 32 million rotating residential proxies that allow users to customize the rotation interval up to 24 hours. It’s important to note that IPRoyal’s proxy pool has a smaller residential proxy plan than leading providers such as Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, state, and city
• Dedicated & shared IPs
• IP rotation: Automatic proxy rotation every 1, 10, or 30 minutes

Pros:

• The fastest residential proxy is responding according to our response time measurements.

Cons:

• No free trial available, unlike many competing providers.

SOAX

SOAX proxy network covers diverse proxy types, such as rotating residential, US ISP, mobile, and US datacenter proxies. Residential proxies are available in almost all countries.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Offers granular targeting options such as city and ASN (Autonomous System Number) level.
• IP rotation: Provides rotation options ranging from 90 seconds to 600 seconds. You can keep your IP address for a set duration if your IP stays connected online.

Infatica

Infatica’s residential proxy network includes 10 million Residential IP addresses compatible with HTTP/SOCKS protocols. You can keep the same IP for 30 minutes before it changes.

Key features:

• Geo-targeting: Country, state, city, and ASN level targeting
• IP rotation: Extend proxy sessions for up to 30 minutes. Multiple proxy rotation options, including scheduled rotation at intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes, rotation with every request, or a sticky option.

Cons:

• Infatica does not provide a free trial; instead, it offers a 7-day paid trial for $4.00.

Rayobyte

Rayobyte sources its residential proxy IPs through a proxyware app called Cash Raven. Their residential service covers over 150 countries.

Key Features:

• Targeting Options: Country and city
• IP Pool: The size of Rayobyte’s IP pool has not been disclosed.
• IP Rotation: Rotate with each connection request and support sticky sessions lasting between 1 and 120 minutes.

ProxyEmpire

ProxyEmpire offers rotating residential IPs in more than 170 countries. Each residential proxy plan includes VIP integration support, which helps users set up their proxies.

Key features:

• Targeting: Country and city level

What is a residential proxy?

Residential proxies serve as a gateway between clients and web servers, preventing the actual API addresses of clients from being revealed. They do that by masking the IP addresses of client machines and assigning a different IP address. Unlike datacenter proxies or mobile proxies, residential proxies’ IP addresses are provided by an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Based on IP rotation, residential proxies are divided into two groups:

1. Rotating residential proxies: Rotating residential proxies alter the IP addresses of their clients with each new request.
2. Static residential proxies: Static residential proxies assign clients the same IP address for each connection request to the destination.

How to choose the right residential proxy provider for your needs

When selecting a residential proxy provider, you can consider the following criteria:

Risks & ethical considerations of using residential proxies

Legal risks:

• Terms of service violations: Many sites prohibit scraping. Non-compliance can lead to bans or legal disputes.
  
• Data privacy laws: Be mindful of GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations when handling user data.

Ethical considerations:

• Respect robots.txt and site-specific scraping policies.
  
• Use proxies only for legitimate business purposes like SEO monitoring, brand protection, or price comparison.
  

Operational risks:

• Unethical providers: Some may obtain IPs without consent. Verify provider sourcing transparency.
  
• Performance risks: Low-quality providers may have slow speeds, poor uptime, or IPs that get quickly blacklisted.

What are the best practices for using residential proxies to avoid detection? 

• Proxy usage strategies: If you’re scraping a localized view, use IPs from the target region and avoid sudden geo jumps in the same session. You can also prefer larger pools with distributed geography to reduce reuse and blocking.

• Request-level tactics: 
  • Rotate User-Agent and Accept headers to match typical browsers/devices.
    
  • Set realistic headers: Accept-Language, Referer, Connection, Accept-Encoding.
    
  • Use cookies & session storage when a flow requires maintaining state.
    
  • Backoff & retry: use exponential backoff for 4xx/5xx errors and treat captchas differently (don’t repeatedly hammer if captcha appears).
    
  • Limit parallelism per target domain: e.g., 1–5 concurrent connections to a single domain, depending on site size.

Why do you need residential proxies?

People utilize proxy services for various reasons, including:

Bypassing geographical restrictions on content. Since websites use web tracking technologies such as browser fingerprinting, they can easily detect your IP address and identify your geolocation based on that. If you are in a restricted area, the website will block your IP address so you cannot access the content.

Obtaining web data. Most websites employ anti-scraping techniques to manage a high volume of client requests and prevent their servers from becoming overloaded with incoming connection requests.

If the target website has robust  protection mechanisms such as honeypot traps, CAPTCHA blockers, etc, you should use a residential proxy network to access and retrieve data without risk of IP blocking. Residential Proxy IPs are more reliable and trustworthy than datacenter proxies due to their provision by a real ISP. Blacklisting residential proxies is more difficult.

Datacenter vs residential proxies

IP source:

The source of the IP address is the main difference between residential and datacenter proxies. Residential proxy IPs are assigned by ISPs that belong to real people. (e.g., someone’s phone or computer), whereas datacenter proxies use cloud servers and data center’s IP pools. 

Proxy anonymity level:

Unlike residential proxies, datacenter IPs are not associated with an internet service provider. This makes it easier for websites to identify proxy users and block them from accessing the website content.

Residential proxies, as opposed to datacenter proxies, rotate clients’ IP addresses each time they connect to a website. If you intend to collect a large amount of data, you must constantly rotate your IP address to avoid revealing your actual IP address.

Otherwise, the website you’re trying to scrape will suspect your activity and block your IP address to prevent data scraping.

Cost:

Residential proxies offer a high level of anonymity and extensive geo-location targeting options. For this reason, the cost of residential proxies is typically higher than that of datacenter proxies.

Speed:

Datacenter proxies are faster than residential proxies because their IP addresses are sourced from a remote cloud server. If you need to complete tasks quickly, dedicated datacenter proxies are a good option. Because shared datacenter proxies are overused, they perform more slowly than dedicated ones.

Use case evaluation:

Both datacenter and residential proxies can be utilized for the following use cases. However, to get the most out of a proxy solution, it is essential to be aware of the primary differences between the two and select the proxy solution that best suits your use case.

FAQs about residential proxies 

CTO

Sedat Dogan

CTO

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Sedat is a technology and information security leader with experience in software development, web data collection and cybersecurity. Sedat:
- Has ⁠20 years of experience as a white-hat hacker and development guru, with extensive expertise in programming languages and server architectures.
- Is an advisor to C-level executives and board members of corporations with high-traffic and mission-critical technology operations like payment infrastructure.
- ⁠Has extensive business acumen alongside his technical expertise.

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Researched by

Gulbahar Karatas

Industry Analyst

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Gülbahar is an AIMultiple industry analyst focused on web data collection, applications of web data and application security.

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