There is no single “best” proxy for scraping — the right choice depends on the sites you’re targeting and your budget. As a fast rule of thumb: use datacenter proxies for cheap, high-volume scraping of sites with light bot protection; use residential or ISP proxies for sites that fingerprint traffic or block datacenter IP ranges (retail, ticketing, social media, search engines); and use mobile proxies only when a target specifically blocks residential and datacenter ranges alike, since mobile IPs cost the most. For most teams starting, a residential proxy provider with pay-as-you-go pricing and a large IP pool is the safest default.
The rest of this guide breaks down how to evaluate providers, compares the proxy types side by side, and reviews specific options with current pricing so you’re not guessing.
What actually makes a proxy “good” for scraping
Marketing pages tend to bury the details that matter. When you’re evaluating a provider, these are the factors worth checking before you pay for anything:
IP pool size and diversity. A larger pool spreads your requests across more unique IPs, which lowers the chance that any single IP address gets rate-limited or blacklisted. Pool size matters less than pool freshness and geographic spread, though — a stale pool of a million IPs can perform worse than a well-rotated pool of 50,000.
Success rate on your actual target. Advertised success rates are almost always measured against easy targets. The number that matters is the success rate against the specific site you’re scraping, which most providers won’t tell you upfront. Many offer free trials or small pay-as-you-go tiers specifically so you can test this yourself before committing.
Pricing model. Providers charge either by bandwidth (per GB), by successful request, or flat-rate by IP count/port. Bandwidth pricing punishes scraping of image- or video-heavy pages; per-request pricing is more predictable for structured data scraping but usually costs more per successful pull.
Anti-bot and JavaScript rendering support. Some providers bundle headless-browser rendering and CAPTCHA/anti-bot bypass into the proxy product itself (often branded as a “scraping API” or “unlocker”). This costs more per request but can replace a chunk of your own scraping infrastructure.
Compliance and IP sourcing. Where a provider’s residential IPs come from matters. Reputable providers disclose their consent-based sourcing (SDK partnerships, opt-in apps) for residential and mobile networks. Vague or unverifiable sourcing is a red flag worth avoiding, both ethically and because poorly sourced pools tend to get blacklisted faster.
Proxy types compared
| Type |
Typical cost |
Best for |
Trade-off |
| Datacenter |
Lowest ($/IP or $/GB) |
High-volume scraping of lightly protected sites |
Easily detected/blocked by sites with fingerprinting |
| Residential |
Mid-to-high ($/GB) |
E-commerce, travel, ad verification, most anti-bot sites |
Slower, priced by bandwidth so heavy pages get expensive |
| ISP (static residential) |
Mid-high |
Scraping that needs a stable IP over a longer session |
Smaller pools than rotating residential |
| Mobile |
Highest |
The most aggressively protected targets (social platforms) |
Expensive; overkill for most scraping jobs |
Proxy providers for scraping: how they actually compare
Pricing and pool sizes change often, so treat the figures below as a snapshot from mid-2026 and confirm current rates directly with the provider before buying. These are pulled from independent testing roundups and provider documentation, not affiliate placements.
| Provider |
Proxy types |
Approx. pricing |
Pool size |
Notable strength |
| Oxylabs |
Residential, ISP, mobile, datacenter |
~$15/GB, ~$600/mo for 50GB, $300/mo minimum |
~102M IPs, 82 countries |
Large, well-maintained pool; strong success rates on protected sites |
| Bright Data |
Residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter |
~$15/GB, ~$625/mo for 50GB |
~72M IPs, 82 countries |
Very large network and granular controls; steeper learning curve |
| Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) |
Residential, datacenter, mobile, ISP |
Tiered, competitive with the above |
~40M IPs, 240+ countries |
Broad country coverage, simpler onboarding, lower minimum spend |
| ScrapFly |
Residential proxy network + scraping API |
Credit-based, ~$100/mo for ~50GB equivalent |
~190M IPs, 50+ countries |
Bundles anti-bot bypass and JS rendering with the proxy layer |
| Webshare |
Datacenter, residential |
Low-cost, pay-as-you-go tiers available |
Smaller than the above |
Cheapest entry point; lower success rate on heavily protected sites |
| MASSIVE |
Residential |
Mid-range |
Smaller, curated pool |
Emphasizes transparent, consent-based IP sourcing |
| Zyte |
Proxy + full scraping API (per-request) |
Per-request pricing, ~$246/mo equivalent for 50GB |
Smaller pool (~500K IPs), 12+ countries |
Long track record in scraping infrastructure; per-request billing suits structured extraction |
If you want a single starting point: Decodo or Webshare for budget-conscious, small-to-mid projects; Oxylabs or Bright Data for enterprise-scale scraping against hard targets; ScrapFly or Zyte if you’d rather pay more per request and get anti-bot handling and rendering bundled in rather than building that yourself.
How to choose based on your actual use case
Scraping a handful of sites occasionally, small budget. Start with a datacenter proxy or a pay-as-you-go residential plan from a lower-cost provider like Webshare or Decodo. Don’t buy a large committed plan until you know your real success rate on your targets.
Scraping e-commerce, travel, or ticketing sites at scale. These sites actively fingerprint and block datacenter ranges. Budget for residential or ISP proxies from a provider with a large pool and strong geo-targeting (Oxylabs, Bright Data, Decodo all qualify).
Scraping heavily bot-protected sites (search engines, social platforms, sites behind Cloudflare/enterprise WAFs). Consider a bundled scraping API/unlocker product (ScrapFly, Zyte, or the “unlocker” tiers Bright Data and Oxylabs also sell) rather than raw proxies — you’ll pay more per successful request but spend far less engineering time on retries, CAPTCHA solving, and browser fingerprinting.
Compliance-sensitive projects. If your organization needs a clear paper trail on IP sourcing consent (common in regulated industries or when scraping personal data), prioritize providers that publish their sourcing methodology, such as MASSIVE, and review their compliance documentation directly rather than relying on marketing copy.
Is it legal to scrape with a proxy?
Using a proxy is not itself illegal — proxies are ordinary infrastructure used for testing, ad verification, price monitoring, and countless legitimate business purposes. The legal risk in web scraping comes from what you scrape and how, not from routing traffic through a proxy.
In the U.S., courts (notably the hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn line of cases) have generally treated scraping of publicly accessible data as not violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but that doesn’t override a site’s terms of service, which can still create contract-law exposure if you agreed to them. Scraping personal data also triggers privacy law (GDPR in the EU, CCPA in California) regardless of whether the data was public. Practically: read the target site’s robots.txt and terms of service, avoid scraping personal or copyrighted data without a lawful basis, rate-limit your requests to avoid degrading the site, and consult a lawyer if you’re operating at commercial scale in a regulated industry. This is general information, not legal advice.
Our Methodology
This guide is based on independent research and real-world proxy user experiences collected and analyzed from May through August 2026.ProxyViews reviews community, feedback, user-reported experiences, provider information, and practical use cases to assess residential proxy services.
Rankings consider factors such as network quality, reliability, geographic coverage, pricing, performance, sourcing transparency, and suitability for different use cases.
ProxyViews does not rank providers based solely on marketing claims or historical reputation. The goal is to provide practical, unbiased information to help users choose a residential proxy service that meets their specific requirements.
