At a Glance
Proxies are an important internet tool. Whether it’s routing your internet traffic through a proxy to provide access to content you might normally be unable to view or using a proxy to gain competitor and SEO insights, monitor pricing, and more.
It can be difficult to determine if a proxy is the right one for your needs. Keep in mind that proxy networks can require a huge investment and a large infrastructure. This is why a good number of proxy providers are resellers, meaning you may face denigrated performance and a lack of support when you experience issues.
You’ll find that the best proxy providers also offer other services for your money. This makes it easier to get everything up and running.
In this article, I’ll tell you about the best available proxy services. I’ll explain why they’re the best, discuss the features they offer, and explain their pricing models.
What Kind of Proxies Are There?
While there are several proxy types, we’re going to concentrate on using one for data scraping and collection. Proxies can be broken down into three categories.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are the most widely used proxies, as they are suitable for most uses. These IP addresses belong to actual, physical devices and your device is basically piggybacking on those devices’ IPs. Residential proxies generally appear as normal users to the rest of the internet, and are tough to detect. Unless a proxy user abuses the ability, making a large IP address pool an important feature.
When you’re using a proxy server, all of your internet traffic appears to be coming from the proxy’s server location. This helps improve online privacy and allows access to geo-blocked content that might normally be unavailable in your area.
Traditional data center proxies pull from a small pool of IP addresses, making it simple for websites and services to block the IPs. However, residential proxies can pull from a pool of thousands of IP addresses from around the globe, making them tougher to block.
A top residential proxy service will allow you to connect through an unlimited number of IP addresses at the same time, allowing you to automate multiple connections from a single location. When connecting through a residential proxy, your IP address changes every time. This makes your online activities much tougher to block.
This makes it an excellent way to scrape data from websites, because scraping from a single IP address makes it easy for your connection to be blocked by web-scraping detection software. It is also a great tool for those who manage several social media accounts, as it prevents their address from being flagged by the social network as suspicious.
Residential proxies can offer faster connection speeds than virtual private networks or shared proxies, as there is less overhead and fewer users connecting to the same servers at once. However, they can also be slower, depending on the host’s network conditions.
Data Center Proxies
Data center (DC) proxies are artificial IP addresses created in data centers that are either owned or leased by the proxy provider. Data center proxies are usually quite fast, making them a good option for use cases that require moving data quickly.
A single server could host thousands of IP addresses. One downside to this is that all of the IPs share the servers IP subnetwork, meaning many data center proxies will appear similar, allowing target servers to automatically ban the entire IP ranges used by the data center proxy if abuse is detected. This can be a bit frustrating, because you’re sharing IP addresses with other users, meaning the IP range may get blocked due to the actions of other users, even if you’re behaving.
When using DC proxies, you are “leasing” an IP address. You keep that IP for the length of your rental period. In the “pros” column, this is a good thing, as you appear to be connecting from the same IP and location during your entire IP leasing period. In the “cons” column, if the IP gets blocked like they often do, you may be stuck with it for the rest of the lease period. However, some DC proxies will allow you to rotate the proxy.
ISP Proxies
Many proxy providers have begun offering ISP proxies. These are hosted on data centers, so you get good performance. However, you should keep in mind that since they carry real IP addresses allocated by an Internet Service Provider, they can more easily be detected as data center proxies.
Static vs Rotating Proxies
What is a Static Proxy?
A static IP address is just as it sounds, allowing you to access the internet from a unique IP address that stays the same for as long as you continue to lease it. This is useful when you need to appear to be a single user at a single location over a prolonged period.
What is a Rotating Proxy?
Rotating proxies change according to your needs. This means the IP address could change with every request you make or it could change at a specific interval. You decide. Rotating proxies provide many benefits. Users can make a single request from a lone IP address or a thousand requests from a thousand IP addresses.
What is a Shared Proxy?
Shared proxies are arguably the most common type of residential proxies. Your device shares the IP address with several other users most of the time. Shared proxies use load balancing and sophisticated architecture to ensure that all users get acceptable performance. You’ll find that shared proxies are quite a bit cheaper than other options, thanks to economies of scale.
What is a Dedicated or Private Proxy?
A dedicated proxy (also called a “private proxy”) is an IP address reserved solely for your use. Connecting to the internet via a dedicated proxy routes all of your date requests through a dedicated server, which hides your real IP address.
Since you are not sharing your IP address with any other users, you have full control over how and when the dedicated IP address is used, as well as which websites are accessed while using the dedicated IP address. This means you won’t have to worry about how other users are making use of the IP, as you would with a shared proxy.
The Best Proxy Services in 2025:
While you might think that choosing the best proxy provider simply involves finding the provider with the largest pool of IP addresses, it’s more complicated than that. A proxy must fulfill the needs of your use case and offer a fallback when it doesn’t. In addition to providing IP addresses, the best proxy services will also provide a host of additional features and APIs.
- Bright Data: The best proxy provider in 2025. Provides access to 72+ million IPs, while offering a large range of features and services. Bright Data is an excellent choice for all your proxy needs.
- Smartproxy: A solid service, with competitive rates. With over 55 million residential IPs, this is a very solid service with competitive prices.
- Oxylabs: The largest proxy pool available. Offers more than 102 million IPs. The provider offers top-notch, yet affordable proxy packages.
- IPRoyal: 32 million residential rotating IPs. IPRoyal is a great basic proxy option, providing nothing fancy, but offering some of the cheapest prices in the industry.
- NetNut: More than 52 million IPs available. NetNut boasts a large residential IP network but is a bit lacking in the value-added services column, while also lacking a pay-as-you-go option.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data’s residential proxy service offers more than 72 million IP addresses. Its datacenter proxies offer more than 770,000 IPs, 700,000+ IPs from its ISP proxy service, and 7,000,000+ IPs from its mobile proxies. Bright Data also offers a collection of out-of-box solutions, making it easy to integrate proxies into applications and scripts. This is why the provider scored the top ranking.
Features
Bright Data offers a solution for just about any usage case. The provider offers an open source, locally run Proxy Manager that allows you to customize and manage your proxy needs from one central location. The provider also offers APIs, as well as a scraping browser.
In addition to offering data center, residential, and mobile IP addresses, Bright Data also offers ISP IPs. Since these are residential IPs hosted on a data center, you benefit from the fast response times of a data center, but with the resilience of residential IP addresses. You also get to use the same IP for as long as you keep paying, which comes in handy for use cases where a static IP address is important.
The Bright Data dashboard is intuitive and easy to use. Each feature includes supporting documentation, code integration examples, and handy videos to take you through the features.
Pricing
Bright Data offers a pay-as-you-go option, which is an excellent option for users who don’t need thousands of dollars worth of data every month. Pay-as-you-go for residential proxies starts at $10.50 per GB.
A $499 a month package is available for users who decide to build their app on the provider’s servers. You’ll only pay $6.30/GB or $5.67/GB if you opt for the $999 a month package. An additional 10% discount is available if you opt to pay annually. A seven-day free trial is available on residential proxies.
Other features, like SERP API or any of the other features mentioned below, all have their own custom pricing.
Web Scraper IDE
The provider’s hosted integrated development environment (IDE) relieves much of the development frustration involved in building custom app solutions, allowing you to progress through the development process as quickly as possible. Pre-built code templates and functions covering a wide range of websites, web services, and social platforms are readily available, reducing development time.
Web Unlocker
If you’re looking to scrape publicly available data from a website, you will run into various “gotchas” in the form of CAPTCHAs or sophisticated fingerprinting techniques erected to roadblock you from the data. Enter Bright Data’s Web Unlocker.
The Web Unlocker allows you to evade roadblocks and restrictions by emulating a real user, working in the background. This allows you to send unlimited numbers of simultaneous requests and receive responses, with no fear of being blocked.
Scraping Browser
Developers use headless browsers to perform data scraping in tandem with proxies. A headless browser operates without a traditional user interface, such as the Graphical User Interface (GUI) found on popular browsers like Chrome or Firefox. This provides a fast, scalable data scraping solution. Unfortunately, this well-known scraping solution is easily detectable, and is often flagged, posing a challenge for anyone looking to perform large-scale data extraction.
Bright Data’s solution to this problem is its Scraping Browser. The browser is a browser with a GUI, referred to as a “headfull” browser. The browser has a visible interface and it can be controlled using the provider’s Puppeteer (Python) or the Playwright (Node.js) APIs. The browser has integrated features that allow it to escape detection by bot protection mechanisms, and to sidestep website restrictions.
The browser runs on the Bright Data servers, making it an ideal solution for large-scale web scraping. Multiple Scraping Browser sessions can be easily launched. The browser includes CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting, and proxy management features, all of which can be controlled via Puppeteer (Python), Playwright (Node.js), or Selenium.
This makes the Scraping Browser a reliable option for scraping projects that require interactions, such as clicking buttons, scrolling, and other activities.
If you’re reading this and are thinking that the Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser sound similar to each other, there is an important difference. Web Unlocker is designed to handle single, one-step data requests, while the Scraping Browser is designed for extensive interaction with a website to harvest data.
SERP API
SERP API is an excellent solution for developers working on an application, building an in-house SEO solution, or researching competitors’ search rankings. By using APIs, you no longer need to develop or maintain parsers or change your code if things change on the target’s end of things.
Bright Data’s SERP API offers support for:
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Yahoo
- Yandex
- Naver
- Baidu
Dataset Marketplace and Custom Datasets
Suppose you want actionable insights but don’t have the resources to build your own solution. Bright Data offers pre-scraped and regularly updated datasets for several industries and verticals. The provider delivers ready-to-use and pre-formatted data. However, the ready-to-eat datasets can be expensive.
While individual records cost only $0.001 each, things can quickly get expensive, as some of the datasets can include millions of records. So, if you were looking to buy a full database that contains 400 million records, full access to that database would cost a cool $400,000. However, you can select from specific subsets of data to bring the cost down, although the minimum order value is $500.
Code Integration Examples & API Playground
Bright Data also offers code integration examples as well as an “API Playground” where developers can test the APIs. API Playground is an online environment where developers can see what results you can expect. The sample scripts and API Playground make for an excellent way to get started with proxy integration.
Bright Data’s sample scripts are even populated with your usernames, passwords, and preferences, so you can simply copy and paste the code into your code.
Dedicated eCommerce Platform
Bright Data’s eCommerce platform allows you to track your competitors’ products across thousands of categories. Using the platform, you can quickly identify when products are added, sold, unlisted, or out of stock. You can also track competitors’ promotions and ad spending.
2. Smartproxy
Smartproxy provides high-performance proxies that boast all of the expected features for a reasonable price. While Smartproxy’s pool of more than 55 million residential IP addresses isn’t quite as impressive as the numbers that some other providers can boast, the provider’s shared IPs perform well for most purposes.
It offers a three-day free trial period, so you can decide if the provider is right for your needs (keep in mind that there is a 100 MB data cap on the free trial period).
Smartproxy also offers data center, mobile, and dedicated data center proxies. Smartproxy has also joined Bright Data and other proxy providers in offering ISP IP addresses, delivering the speed of data center proxies, as well as the reliability and trust of residential IPs.
Smartproxy scores high on the ease of use scale, allowing users to access the tools, proxies, and data they require with just a few clicks of the mouse. An easy-to-use Endpoint Generator makes it easy to generate .txt or .CSV list of proxies to load into your program.
Pricing
Smartproxy offers pay-as-you-go plans for non-enterprise users, starting at $7.00 per GB. Meanwhile, subscriptions start at $12 per month for 2GB of data.
Consumer pricing is as follows:
- 2GB = $6/GB
- 8GB = $5.50/GB
- 25GB = $5.20/GB
- 50GB = $4.90/GB
- 100GB = $4.50/GB
Enterprise pricing is as follows:
- 250GB = $4.00/GB
- 500GB = $3.50/GB
- 1,000GB = $3.00/GB
- 2,000GB = $2.80/GB
- 5,000GB = $2.20/GB
Site Unblocker
Smartproxy offers its own Site Unblocker, allowing users to easily site scrape by offering a single endpoint to integrate into their code. The feature’s “Intelligent Proxy Selection” option allows users to select the correct proxy type for the website they have in their crosshairs. The provider automatically retires and replaces blocked IPs.
APIs
Smartproxy joins other top-ranked providers by offering a wide range of APIs to make it easier to scrape. Smartproxy’s Social Media API offering is unique among proxy providers. SERP and eCommerce APIs are also available.
No-Code Scraper
If you want to harvest data from the web but have no idea how to go about it, you’ll appreciate Smartproxy’s “no-code” solution. The proxy provider’s scraper allows you to select a predefined template, use point and click to feed it its parameters, and you’ll be scraping in no time.
Smartproxy also offers a browser extension that allows users to click on the web page elements that they wish to scrape. And Smartproxy takes it from there. While browser scrapers are convenient, they are best reserved for basic scraping.
X Browser
Smartproxy’s application allows Windows and Mac users to juggle multiple ”identities” at the same time. Multiple identities allow users to visit the same page daily using multiple profiles, all of which have unique fingerprints. This prevents websites from linking multiple profiles back to any of your devices, MAC address, or IP address.
3. Oxylabs
Oxylabs is arguably the best-known and largest proxy provider today. The provider boasts a pool of 102 million IP addresses. Oxylabs matches up head-to-head with other proxy providers when comparing performance and features. However, Oxylabs’ pricing is more expensive than others on this list.
Pricing
Oxylabs also offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its residential IP address pool, providing an excellent way to get started for users simply looking to give the service a try or users who don’t expect to use much data. Pay-as-you-go prices start at $8 per GB, but monthly packages are a bit cheaper.
Monthly packages start at $99 per month ($7.75 per GB), the $300 per month package comes out to $7.50 per GB, and if you commit to $600 per month you’re paying only $7 per GB. Extra data is available if you need it, but only up to an extra 50GB per month for $8 per GB. Custom plans are available, and you can score a 10% discount if you pay annually.
Features
Oxylabs offers everything that you would expect from a top-notch proxy provider, including a large number of APIs, an easy-to-use endpoint generator, and ISP proxies.
The provider’s dashboard is well-regarded by users, as it provides all of the information users require. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. The dashboard boasts an “Endpoint generator” for users who are looking for a list of proxies that can be plugged into their SaaS application Simply select session type and location parameters, then export the list of endpoints in CSV, JSON, or TXT formats. Nice!
APIs
Oxylabs arguably has the largest number of stock APIs of any provider on this list. Ready-to-go APIs are available for:
- SERPs
- e-Commerce
- Real estate
- Web scraper
Oxylabs uses a machine learning parser, meaning it can adjust to different layouts, JavaScript rendering, and more.
Oxylabs’ APIs on offer start at $49 a month for approximately 17,500 results, increasing to $249 per month for 104,000 results.
Web Crawler
Oxylabs’ Web Crawler add-on spiders through web pages until it has run out of new URLs that match the patterns specified by the user. Users input information to determine the crawling scope, specify scraping parameters, and submit the request.
Datasets
Oxylabs also offers its own datasets. These include:
- AngelList startup data
- CrunchBase data
- Product hunt data
This option is not cheap, as it starts at $1,000 per month, and your use case needs to fit into the predefined scope of the dataset. That said, if it fits your needs, it’s cheaper to build and maintain your own solution.
Scheduler
OxyLab’s built-in Scheduler feature allows users to create multiple jobs, setting the time intervals. You’ll receive automatic data updates sent to your cloud of choice.
4. IPRoyal
IPRoyal is a growing proxy provider, as it has 32m residential proxies, which is quadruple what it offered not so long ago. The provider also boasts impressive performance for its asking price.
The provider offers pay-as-you-go residential IPs at multiple price ranges. Their Royal Residential Proxies (their main offering) pricing is as follows:
- 1 GB = $7
- 2 GB = $5.95/GB
- 10 to 50 GB = $5.25/GB
- 50 to 100 GB = $4.90/GB
- 100 to 250 GB = $4.55/GB
- 250 to 500 GB = $4.20/GB
- 500 to 1,000 GB = $3.50/GB
- 1000 to 3,000 GB = $3.15/GB
- 3000 to 50,00 GB = $2.80/GB
- 5000 to 10,000 GB = $2.45/GB
- 10,000+ GB = $1.75/GB
Even at the expensive end of things, IPRoyal’s pricing is quite competitive. The proxies perform quite well.
IPRoyal is quite open about how it sources its residential IPs. In the past, the provider offered a service that allowed users to lease some of their unused bandwidth to IPRoyal users. This part of the business has been rebranded and is now a standalone service called pawns.app.
Features
IPRoyal doesn’t offer the advanced features provided by its competitors, offering only IP services. This may not be a big deal for those in search of IPs and don’t want to break the bank while using them.
The provider offers residential, data center, mobile, and private/dedicated IP options, with absolutely no bandwidth or traffic limitations.
IPRoyal’s recently revamped dashboard is quite user-friendly. Plus, users who plug their proxies into a third-party service will find that IPRoyal is one of the easiest-to-use proxy services in the industry. Simply tell it the type of proxy you require, the location, static or rotating, and how many your IPs need, and the service will spit out a list to be copied and pasted into the third-party platform.
It also offers a proxy tester that allows users to upload a list of proxies and delete those that are failing before transferring them.
IPRoyal is a great option for users in search of a cheap but reliable proxy service. However, if you need more than basic IP services, you’re advised to look elsewhere.
5. NetNut
NetNut offers more than 85 million residential IP addresses and over 1 million static IPs. The Tel Aviv, Israel proxy provider delivers performance equal to other top providers. Unfortunately, the provider’s pricing models are a little old-fashioned, as is its user experience.
Pricing
NetNut pricing starts at $800 a month for a 100GB plan ($8 per GB), rising up to $4,000 per month for a 1TB plan ($4 per GB). While the pricing per GB is not a big deal, customers are required to commit to a minimum monthly charge. This model is quickly becoming less popular among customers, as they want the flexibility of pay-as-you-go and other more modern options. All plans include city and state targeting.
Features
NetNut is another “just the basics” proxy service, which may not be enough for advanced users and those looking for all of the “bells and whistles” offered by some of the providers on this list. However, for those looking for reliable, well-performing proxies, NetNut could do the job for you.
The provider has recently improved its feature set, adding a Website Unblocker and a SERP Scraper API. The Website Unblocker bypasses CAPTCHAs to anonymously extract data from websites. The Google SERP Scraper API provides simple API integration, real-time structured data, and the ability to retrieve search results from any location, in any language.
Proxy Testing Methodology
I put every proxy on this list through a rigorous research and testing process. While speeds, content access, and reliability are important, there are several other features that need to be considered.
Here is a basic overview of my proxy methodology:
- Determine the type(s) of proxies to be tested (residential, data center, ISP, mobile).
- Turn off all other network services that might interfere with the proxy testing process.
- Determine a baseline by testing the network without a proxy.
- Anonymity testing to determine if the proxy reveals my actual IP address.
- Speed and performance testing to measure the connection speed through the proxy, using custom scripts as well as the FOGLDN Proxy Tester. I use the same countries for each test: UK, USA, Hong Kong, France, and Germany. I run 300 residential proxies to access the same sites: https://bbc.com and https://www.pixelprivacy.com. I then determine an average of these results.
- Geo-location testing using a simple extension, like BP Proxy Switcher. I test the access to geo-restricted websites or services to verify if the proxy represents the claimed location.
- I also test any additional features that the proxy may offer, such as browsers, playgrounds, APIs, and other tools. I test each of them to get a good understanding of the features and their effectiveness.
- Documentation and support are important to all users. Therefore, I take a close look at the documentation and query support with technical questions to determine their promptness and knowledge in responding.
In Closing
We’ve learned that proxies are an important internet tool. Proxies not only allow you to access content you’d normally not have access to, like geo-controlled streaming content, but they also offer a way to gain insights into your competitors while also providing SEO insights.
Finding the right proxy for your needs takes a bit of research and testing, and, hopefully my article will help you make this important decision.
