Do web unblockers hide my real IP address?

Most site unblockers hide your real IP address by sending your internet traffic through other servers. Free unblockers, though, might keep records or share your data. For better security, choose a trusted provider with a clear privacy policy.

Is there a difference between a Web Unblocker and a Site Unblocker?

No, there is no technical difference. The terms are used interchangeably. While developers often use the term 'Web Unblocker' or 'proxy-based solution', general users might search for 'Site Unblocker' tools to bypass restrictions on specific websites. Both solutions use proxy networks to access blocked content.

Is using a website unblocker safe for my data?

Yes, but safety depends on the provider. While many suspicious free proxy sites may log your activities or inject malicious scripts, professional website unblockers are designed with security in mind. These tools utilize high-level encryption (such as AES-256) to secure your traffic, ensuring that your personal data and browsing history remain private and protected from third-party tracking.

Is a website unblocker legal in my country?

In most countries, using a website unblocker is perfectly legal for accessing information and bypassing network restrictions for research or personal use. As of 2026, global legal trends generally focus on how the tool is used rather than the tool itself.While using these services is legal, we recommend always adhering to the terms of service of the websites you access and checking your local jurisdiction's latest digital compliance regulations.

Can I use a web unblocker on my smartphone or tablet?

Many web unblockers work with mobile browsers, so you usually don't need to install extra software. Some companies also have special apps or browser add-ons for Android and iOS devices.

Do I need to install software to use a web unblocker?

You don't always need to install software, since some unblockers work right in your browser. If you want better security or faster speeds, you might want to try a VPN-based unblocker to unblock sites.

Do web unblockers work on social media platforms?

Some unblockers can be used on social media, but how well they work can change. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok often block known free proxy servers. Paid proxy services or those that use rotating IP addresses are usually more reliable than free ones.

Can web unblockers bypass government censorship?

Web unblockers can help you reach restricted websites. But in countries with strict internet rules, many unblockers are blocked too. If you live in one of these places, check your local laws before trying to get around restrictions.

What is the best web unblocker?

The best web unblocker for you depends on what you need: speed, security, price, or which devices you use. Paid options, especially VPN-based ones, are usually more reliable, faster, and safer than free browser proxies.

Data Web Data Scraping Anti-Blocking

Top 5 Free Website Unblockers & Free Trials in 2026

Gulbahar Karatas

updated on Jan 23, 2026

See our ethical norms

Web unblockers can access pages that proxies fail to retrieve. We benchmarked the best web unblocker solutions with ~40,000 requests on real-world high-security websites (i.e., Amazon) and 6 lab tests:

Price comparison of the website unblockers

The following providers offer a limited volume of free credits for small-scale scraping projects, with no upfront payment required:

Web unblocker benchmark results

Success rates:

All brands achieved >95% accuracy rates in multiple real-world tests. In our web unblocker tests, Bright Data led by a small margin overall, while Zyte showed the tightest confidence interval (more consistent results across runs).

In 2 of 3 real-world batches,Bright Data achieved the highest average success rate among tested web unblockers (i.e. bypassing tools). Significantly higher success rates in lab tests, which included more difficult scenarios like scraping websites that presented JavaScript (JS) challenges.
Zyte delivered consistently high success with a narrow 95% CI, suggesting steadier performance batch-to-batch.
Oxylabs and Decodo remained within the 95–99% band across runs, trailing the leaders by a small but measurable gap.

Bars show the 95% confidence interval for the average success rate per provider. “All” aggregates all three batches.

Average response time:

All solutions had median response times between 1 and 4 seconds:

Each box shows the range of the lowest and highest calculated expected median response time with a 95% confidence interval from the 3 batches that were analyzed.

Anti-bot tests

While the tests on websites like Amazon provide insights about the unblocker’s robustness, scrapers sometimes face even more complex challenges. Publishers can enable anti-scraping features, such as “Interactive Challenge,” to make it harder for bots to access their websites.

Using Cloudflare’s services, we tested the success rates of different tools in overcoming different scraping challenges. This part of the benchmark was done by sending requests to target sites that we created. Therefore, these can be considered as lab tests:

Pricing

Below we compare web unblocker pricing by converting each plan to requests per dollar:

How we compare pricing: we normalize plans to an example usage of 25,000 successful requests to Amazon.com.

Per-request billing: cost = (price per 1k requests × 25).
Per-GB billing: we assume ~0.4 MB per request (≈ 10 GB total), so cost = (price per GB × 10). We choose the lowest plan/tier that covers 25k requests (or PAYG if cheaper). Actual costs vary by target pages, payload size, and success rate. See our full methodology for details.

Features

Site unblocker have very few configuration options, and we didn’t use any configuration during our benchmark.

However, we noticed that Bright Data has an “x-unblock-expect” header instructing the bypassing tool to run until a specific CSS selector is retrieved. This is helpful to:

Ensure all data on the page is collected. Users can ensure that the entire page is collected by providing a CSS selector at the bottom of the page.
Increase crawl speed: If users need data in a specific part of the page, they can choose a CSS selector under the relevant section to accelerate crawl speed.

This is a differentiating feature we didn’t encounter in other providers.

Stability of unlocking tools success rates over time

All tested unlocking software providers achieved consistently high success rates across multiple real-world benchmarks.
While performance levels vary slightly between vendors, all maintained strong reliability under identical testing conditions.

In general:

The top performers showed stable results with minimal daily fluctuation.
Mid-range performers remained within a close margin, typically trailing by only a few percentage points.
Success rate trends can be viewed directly in the chart above, which updates automatically as new benchmark data is collected.

These figures reflect each provider’s ability to return valid, CAPTCHA-free responses across search, e-commerce, and social media targets.

Best web unblocker browsers & extensions for 2026

Bright Data Web Unblocker API allows users to target specific granular levels, including country, city, and ASN. The tool operates on a pay-as-you-go ($1.50/CPM ) and subscription plan, charging only for completed requests. In our benchmarks, it showed a slightly higher success rate than Zyte, Oxylabs, and Decodo on high-security, JS-heavy pages.

Pros:

Premium domain list (add-on, $1/CPM) for more challenging targets that need extra unlocking software resources.
By default, the Web Unlocker API solves CAPTCHA encountered during proxy requests when this function is enabled.
Custom Web Unblocker mode to send headers/cookies and use an expect parameter to wait for specific page elements.

Cons:

A feature-rich setup may require more configuration than simpler bypassing tool websites (online proxies).

Pricing

Pay-As-You-Go: $1.5/ 1K results
Starting price: $1.27/ 1K Results
Free trial: 7-day free trial for companies

Start Your 7-Day Free Trial with $5 Credit Included

Visit Website

Oxylabs Web Unblocker allows users to make detailed requests, including targeting specific states, cities, or exact coordinates. JavaScript rendering can be activated by adding a particular header to the request, and there are no additional charges for this feature.

Pros:

This service lets you target specific coordinates and provides JavaScript rendering at no extra cost.

Cons:

Costs increase with the amount of data used. Large pages or repeated requests may result in higher fees than pricing based on each request.

Pricing

Starting price: $9.4/GB
Free trial: 7-day trial that includes 1 GB of traffic

Get 1GB Free Data & Start Your 7-Day Trial

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Decodo provides user-friendly site-unblocking technology, making it ideal for beginners. It allows users to send custom cookies and request headers and target specific locations at the city, state, and country levels. The tool operates on a traffic-based pricing model. The bypassing tool provides results in HTML format with JavaScript.

Pros:

If your team is new to website unblockers and wants a simple way to get rendered HTML output, this is a good place to start.

Cons:

Keep in mind that traffic-based plans may cost more if you work with pages that use a lot of JavaScript or have large amounts of data.

Pricing

Starting price: $28 includes 2 GB
Free trial: 14-day money-back guarantee

Try with 14-Day Refund Guarantee

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Zyte offers an unblocker solution as part of its API. In our benchmark, Zyte has the lowest-priced and fastest unlocking software, responding within ~2 seconds on average in real-world tests.

The tool offers a headless browser and browser automation capabilities, enabling high success rates (i.e., 95%+) for automated testing. If you don’t already have an automation built with a tool like Selenium or Puppeteer, you can use Zyte’s API instead.

Pros:

This tool is suitable for high-throughput workflows that rely on integrated browser automation.

Cons:

The advanced automation features offer substantial functionality; however, users with limited experience may require additional time to understand scripted workflow processes.

Pricing

Free trial: 7-day
Starting price: $100

Test the Fastest Unblocker: Start 7-Day Free Trial

Visit Website

Crawlbase is recognized for its web scraping solutions, providing scraping APIs and proxies. Their offerings include the Crawling API, a web-scraping API with proxy mode, and the Smart Proxy API, which combines datacenter and residential proxies.

However, Crawlbase’s geographic coverage is limited to 46 countries and lacks the capability for city-specific targeting. For advanced features like JavaScript Rendering and custom geolocation options, Crawlbase offers a premium package priced at $289.

Pros:

This option is ideal for teams focused on web scraping who need a single API and basic tools to bypass blocks.

Cons:

Base plans include general geographic targeting, but not city-level options. Advanced features like JavaScript rendering and custom locations are available with premium plans.

Pricing

Starting price: $99
Free trial: 30-day trial with 5,000 credits

Web unblocker benchmark methodology

Real-world tests

In our benchmark, we ran three tests across 3,600 URLs from major e-commerce websites. Half of the URLs had random query strings added to the end to get non-cached results. The total number of URLs was 43,200 across three runs with four participants, for a total of 3,600 URLs. A curl command is used to call the unlocking software without any parameters.

Categories: Search engines, e-commerce, and social media
Targets: CAPTCHA-prone and geo-restricted pages (e.g., Google SERP, Instagram, Amazon product pages)
Cycle: Every 15 minutes, identical HTTP/2 requests are sent through all bypassing tool vendors.

Performance evaluation criteria:

Success Rate (%): Measures how often the unlocking software returns a valid, fully loaded page without CAPTCHAs, redirect loops, or access errors.
Response Time (s): Average time to receive a complete, validated page response.
Error Classification: Categorizes failed requests by cause (e.g., CAPTCHA challenge, HTTP 403/429 rate limits, or connection failure).

Validation rules:

HTTP status 200–399 required
Content verified with CSS selectors unique to each platform
Responses containing block pages, challenge pages, or empty content are marked as failed.

We calculated each request’s response time and saved the HTML content to analyze how effective and fast each bypassing tool is. For more, see the methodology of the web scraping API benchmark.

Lab tests

This test measures the vendors’ capabilities to handle anti-bot techniques on various websites.

However, there are many different anti-bot techniques. To understand how vendors handle specific anti-scraper technologies, we set up a series of URLs on aimultiple.com that used Cloudflare’s anti-scraper technologies, the market leader in DDoS and bot protection. Techniques are sorted from the easiest to the hardest to overcome

Challenges (i.e., managed challenge, JS challenge, and interactive challenge
UA Mode
High Security Level
Browser Integrity Check

Participants

We focused on the largest web data brands by employee count and product scope. We tested all brands that had more than 100 employees and offered unlocking software as well as datacenter and residential proxies:

Bright Data Web Unlocker
Decodo Site Unblocker
Oxylabs Web Unblocker
Zyte API in proxy mode

What is a website unblocker? How it works vs standard proxies

A web unblocker, or bypassing tool, is an advanced proxy tool that routes your connection through another server.

These solutions can autonomously determine the appropriate proxy service for a given task, providing advanced features such as browser fingerprinting, JavaScript execution, and enhanced scraping functionalities that are not usually available in standard proxy servers.

Streaming platforms like YouTube and dynamic social media sites (TikTok, X, etc.) often have strict regional blocks or office network restrictions.

Standard proxies may struggle with the high bandwidth required for video, but a professional web unblocker ensures a smooth experience.

By routing your connection through optimized servers, these tools bypass geo-fencing instantly, allowing you to access global content without lag or ‘video unavailable’ errors.

What is the difference between a web unblocker and proxy servers?

Success rates

Website unblockers have high success rates because they, by default, leverage advanced features such as browser fingerprinting, JS rendering, and scraping. This enables users to access blocked websites.

These capabilities are not found in regular proxy services. Therefore, proxy users must implement such capabilities to evade anti-bot features.

Ease of use

Proxies need to be configured to bypass anti-bot measures on websites. It is also not sufficient to configure them once. Websites improve their detection mechanisms over time, so proxy users need to evolve their tactics to scrape websites successfully.

Site unblocker do not require any configuration.

Other

Site unblockers can use different methods, such as a virtual private network, a proxy server, or a browser extension. A proxy server routes internet traffic through a different server, masking a user’s real IP address, but it does not encrypt data.