Best Proxy Providers 2026: Expert-Reviewed & Compared

Proxy infrastructure isn’t a commodity when you’re running real workloads. The right provider can cut failed requests, stabilize sessions across regions, and keep your pipelines predictable as you scale from one tool to multiple automations. That’s why we did some research to provide you with the best proxy providers 2026 list.

This guide breaks down proxy types, performance signals, and pricing models–so you can compare vendors like a buyer, not a guesser.

Best Proxy Providers 2026 vs 2025 – What Changed For Modern Workflows

Bot traffic has been trending up year over year: 47.5% in 2022, 49.6% in 2023, and 51% in 2024. Bad bots also moved fast, from 30.2% to 32%, then up to 51% in 2024/2025 according to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report. Imperva links that acceleration to AI and LLM adoption, which makes automation cheaper to build and easier to scale.

If this slope holds, expect automated traffic to stay above 51% into 2026, which pushes platforms toward tougher scoring and stricter session scrutiny.

• Platforms score traffic quality, not just IPs.

Many stacks assign per-request risk scores and act on them. You need stable sessions and consistent client behavior.

• Residential and mobile pools face more scrutiny.

Providers with weak sourcing burn faster on sensitive targets. Security teams now detect residential proxy abuse with ML models.

• Targeting became a baseline feature.

City, ASN, and ISP controls reduce randomness in monitoring and QA. Sticky sessions matter for multi-step flows and account work.

• Pricing got more “engineering-shaped”.

The real cost comes from retries, concurrency, and geo premiums. Compare best proxy providers 2026 by cost per successful request, not by headline units.

• Compliance and KYC became a real differentiator.

Parts of the residential proxy services on the market still attract abuse-driven supply. Vendors now differ more on screening, enforcement, and transparency.

How To Choose Among The Best Proxy Providers 2026: Use Cases

Some plans look similar on paper, but workloads stress them in different ways. Many sites treat automated access as normal nowadays. That shifts your priorities: bandwidth economics for scraping, stability for accounts, and fixed regions for monitoring.

Below, each section maps a workflow to its types, session settings, and plan checks.

LLM & Data Enrichment

Choose stability over raw throughput for enrichment pipelines. Use residential for breadth and ISP for repeat sources. Keep sessions sticky when you paginate or follow chains. Set conservative concurrency to reduce churn. Require detailed error breakdowns by domain and status code. Prefer providers with an API for usage and limits. Avoid plans that hide throttling behind “fair use” language.

Web Scraping & Competitive Research

Optimize for unit economics and predictable scaling. Use datacenter IPs for low-risk, public content. Add residential when you need broader geo realism. Rotate by default for single-request pages. Switch to sticky only when the flow needs state. Treat retries as a pricing multiplier. Calculate cost per successful request from a pilot run. Lock in clear overage rules before you commit.

Testing & Monitoring

Buy repeatability first, not coverage. Use static ISP or static datacenter exits per region. Keep a small fixed egress set for clean baselines. Prioritize low jitter and stable routing. Require a status page and incident history. Make sure the provider supports your check frequency and timeouts. Avoid pools that reshuffle exits without session control.

Ads & Accounts

Prioritize consistency and identity control. Use dedicated ISP or mobile for sensitive flows. Keep geo consistent across sessions and tools. Control when IPs change, and avoid mid-session rotation. Use strict access controls and auditable team seats. Prefer allowlists or token auth for automation. Avoid shared exits for critical accounts.

Additional Tips: Proxy Types Explained

If you’re evaluating the best proxy providers for IP types, start by mapping each class to your workload.

• Datacenter IPs deliver the best speed-per-dollar and scale cleanly. Use them for low-risk pages, monitoring, and bulk fetches. Expect higher block sensitivity on strict consumer platforms.
• Residential proxies give you better geo realism and stronger “normal user” signals. They fit scraping, enrichment, and geo testing where targets react to datacenter traffic. Start here if coverage matters more than raw speed.
• ISP solutions sit between datacenter and residential. They often provide stable, long sessions with fewer surprises. Pick ISP when you need consistency for multi-step flows and repeat checks.
• Mobile options emulate carrier traffic and can reduce friction on sensitive flows. They cost more and usually limit throughput, so use them when reputation signals or carrier ASN really matter, not as your default layer.
• Shared vs dedicated proxies decides how much reputation noise you tolerate. Shared costs less but adds variability from other users. Dedicated costs more but protects stability for accounts, allowlists, and repeatable monitoring. To compare them try using proxy speed test.

In practice, start with a datacenter for speed or residential for coverage. Add ISP when you need stable sessions. Use mobile proxy networks only when the workflow forces it.

5 Best Proxy Providers (Based on Real Tests & Reviews)

Looking for the best proxy providers 2026 without wasting weeks on trials and guesswork? This shortlist highlights vendors that deliver practical geo targeting, stable sessions, and solid protocol support. Use it to match intermediary types to LLM enrichment, web scraping, testing/monitoring, or ads and account operations. Compare features first, then validate performance on your real targets before you commit.

Geonix

Geonix focuses on clean setup and fast rollout which makes it one of the best proxy providers 2026. You can choose from datacenter IPv4/IPv6, ISP, mobile, and residential traffic. The dashboard supports city/state targeting and flexible auth. The provider also mentions an API for workflow automation.

Key advantages

• Supports IPv4, IPv6, ISP, mobile, and residential proxy types.
• Offers ISP IPs with ISP-level selection plus city/state/region targeting options.
• Lists residential pricing “from $2/GB” and limits only by plan bandwidth.
• Lets you manage orders via API: pricing calculation, order creation, and balance endpoints.
• Provides renewal tooling via API docs, which helps automated subscriptions.
• Ships mobile solutions with 5G/4G/LTE positioning and entry pricing “from $14”.
• Publishes a clear refund policy with rental-period exceptions and payment rules.
• G2 score: 4.9/5

Best for

Geonix is a solid choice for multi-location proxy servers QA, monitoring baselines, and scraping pipelines. It also fits small teams (ops, QA, data) that need a predictable proxy for data scraping or some other small businesses and want fewer moving parts. Broad geo options and subnet diversity reduce drift, while the API helps automate renewals and lifecycle tasks.

For those who want to check proxy performance there is also a special free toolset.

Proxy-Seller

Proxy-Seller makes rotation and targeting easy to tune per target. You can switch between time-based rotation, per-request rotation, and sticky sessions. The service also highlights ISP-level targeting for residential traffic.

Key advantages

• Provides 20M+ rotating residential IPs from real users.
• Covers 220+ countries for residential and ISP proxy plans.
• Supports rotation by time, request, or sticky mode.
• Keeps sticky sessions up to 24 hours, but the end-user can drop earlier.
• Supports targeting by country, city, and ISP.
• Publishes a 72-hour refund window for specific failure cases.
• G2 score:4.7/5

Best for

Pick Proxy-Seller when rotation strategy drives success. It fits scraping, multi-geo testing, and mobile-dependent verification workflows.

Bright Data

Bright Data combines a large IP network with managed scraping products. You can target by city, carrier, or ASN, then outsource unblocking and parsing to their APIs. That setup reduces retries when you run LLM enrichment and high-scale collection.

Key advantages

• Lists 150M+ residential IPs and targeting by country, city, carrier, and ASN.
• Web Unlocker positions “pay only for successful extraction” with a single request flow.
• SERP API positions “pay only for successful delivery” and sub-1s results.
• Web Scraper API supports API-based scraping and delivery workflows.
• Web Scraper pricing copy mentions starting at $0.001/record.
• Products page highlights datasets and multiple scraper APIs.
• G2 score: 4.6/5

Best for

Use Bright Data when you need strict targeting and fewer infrastructure headaches. It fits LLM enrichment, large scraping jobs, and SERP pipelines.

Oxylabs

The next in the best proxy providers 2026 shortlist is Oxylabs. It focuses on high-volume data collection and managed scraping. You can use Web Unblocker when targets block hard, then shift to scraper APIs for structured delivery. Their pricing pages include practical limits like rate caps, which helps planning.

Key advantages

• Advertises 175M+ residential and 2M datacenter IPs.
• Offers Web Unblocker for high-friction targets, so you don’t babysit retries.
• Provides Scraper APIs that return structured output, which reduces parsing work.
• Positions the stack for large-scale data gathering and monitoring use cases.
• Lists 99.9% proxy uptime performance for datacenter IPs.
• Fits teams that want managed extraction paths instead of building everything in-house.
• G2 score: 4.5/5

Best for

Pick Oxylabs when you need scale and operational predictability. It fits scraping at volume and monitoring across many targets.

Decodo

Decodo offers a large residential network with both rotating and sticky sessions. You can also manage access through a public API, including sub-user limits and usage monitoring. The product pages lean into “fast setup” and workflow-focused tools like SERP scraping.

Key advantages

• Rotating proxy servers page lists pricing “from $1.5/GB”.
• Lists 115M+ residential IPs across 195+ locations and a 99.86% success rate claim.
• Offers a 3-day free trial and a 14-day money-back option, per product copy.
• Has team tooling via API (sub-users, limits, usage visibility), which works well for small agencies.
• Ships workflow tools like SERP scraping and other scraping endpoints, so you spend less time parsing HTML.
• G2 score: 4.6/5

Best for

Choose Decodo when you need strong session control and quick adoption. It fits scraping, enrichment, and multi-geo workflows.

Best Proxy Providers 2026: Prices Comparison

Here’s a quick pricing snapshot to help you compare these five providers by pricing plans for proxies.

Practical Benchmark Notes

These are field notes from the best proxy providers 2026 shortlist. I ran each provider through a concrete workflow and logged the first failure mode plus the fix.

Geonix – geo QA for pricing pages in 5 regions

I used a small batch of static IPv4 IPs plus a bit of residential bandwidth because I needed repeatable checks, not huge scale. The plan was boring on purpose: hit the same pricing page from five regions every hour, store the HTML snapshot, and chart load time + status codes. On day one, the first thing that “broke” wasn’t bans–it was my baseline. My timings jumped all over the place, and the graphs looked noisy enough to be useless.

The first signal came from my logs: the request sequence mixed regions in one run, so my monitor compared apples to oranges. I split the job by region and pinned one static IP per region, then I stopped treating “a proxy pool” like a single thing. Immediately the noise dropped, and I could finally spot real changes. One region kept serving a different layout, so I used the city/state targeting to confirm it wasn’t a random exit. After that, I kept Geonix as my “boring and stable layer” for monitoring and geo QA, because it let me trust my own data instead of chasing phantom variance.

Proxy-Seller – price scraping with rotation tuning, plus one mobile edge case

I started with rotating residential for a price tracker that pulled a lot of product pages across multiple stores. At first I went full “rotate everything” because it sounded safer, and I watched my retry rate climb. The log pattern looked obvious in hindsight: a wave of soft failures, then a few successful hits, then more failures–like my traffic never settled into a consistent rhythm.

I changed my approach and split the workflow. I kept fast rotation for stateless listing pages, but I switched stateful steps to sticky sessions so the flow stopped resetting itself mid-way. That single change reduced the weird redirects and “start over” behavior, and it made my runs more predictable. One target still felt picky, so I tried ISP targeting on residential as a controlled experiment; the first signal was fewer sudden spikes in denied responses at the same concurrency. Later, I added a small mobile plan for a verification-heavy step where stability mattered more than speed, and I only rotated between sessions so I didn’t sabotage my own flow. The takeaway was simple: rotation is a tool, not a default setting.

Bright Data – LLM enrichment where retries killed throughput

I used Bright Data for an enrichment pipeline where I had strict location requirements and a lot of URLs to process. I began with standard residential endpoints and expected it to “just work,” but a small set of domains started draining time with retries and intermittent blocks. The first thing I noticed wasn’t even the errors–it was the queue. My workers stayed busy but throughput didn’t move, and my per-domain metrics showed a few sites eating the majority of the run time.

So I stopped forcing one strategy onto every target. I kept standard residential for the easy domains, then routed the hard ones through an unblocker-style workflow because I wanted fewer moving parts and less babysitting. It cost more per request, but the pipeline stopped flapping, my logs got cleaner, and the queue finally moved at a steady pace. I treated it like paying for reliability: not magic, just fewer retries and less time spent tuning per-site behavior.

Oxylabs – ecommerce crawl with a “two-lane” strategy

I ran an ecommerce crawl with two very different page types: category/listings and product detail pages. I pushed listings through datacenter IPs because they loaded fast and kept the cost under control at high volume. Then product pages broke first–dynamic sections came back partially rendered, and my parser started failing in annoying, inconsistent ways. The first signal was an uptick in “missing field” errors rather than clean 4xx blocks, which made it harder to debug.

I fixed it by splitting the crawl into lanes. Listings stayed on the datacenter, and product URLs moved to a managed unblocking flow. That reduced broken HTML and stabilized the content enough for parsing. For a few sites that changed often, I switched to structured API-style outputs so I didn’t fight the DOM every week. The biggest win wasn’t any single feature–it was the architecture decision to keep easy pages cheap and fast while giving hard pages a more reliable path.

Decodo – sticky sessions for a multi-step flow, rotating for the long tail

I picked Decodo because I wanted something that felt like an all-rounder: quick to start, broad coverage, and decent session controls. I ran two jobs in parallel. Rotating residential handled a long list of one-off pages smoothly, so I didn’t overthink it. The multi-step flow was the problem: it broke during step two, and the first signal was a pattern of “works once, fails next time” behavior even with the same inputs.

I stopped guessing and treated it like a session issue. I moved that flow to sticky sessions, tested 30 minutes, and watched the error pattern drop. When it stayed stable, I pushed to 60 minutes and the workflow finally behaved like a normal workstation session instead of a roulette wheel. I also separated usage by project in my tracking so spending stayed visible, because nothing kills a setup faster than “where did the budget go?” confusion.

Best Proxy Providers 2026: Final Thoughts

In 2026, the “right” provider is the one that keeps your workflow predictable. That means fewer surprise failures, fewer weird session resets, and less time babysitting retries. Ignore the loudest marketing numbers and focus on what actually moves your pipeline: success rate on your targets, stable sessions when state matters, and geo controls that don’t drift.

Use the best proxy providers 2026 shortlist as a starting point, then make the decision with a small, measurable pilot. Run one real scenario end-to-end (LLM enrichment, scraping, monitoring, or ads/account ops), log what fails first, and check how quickly you can stabilize it with session and targeting tweaks. Once the flow behaves, scale the plan–and compare pricing by what you successfully ship, not what you theoretically bought.

If you want the simplest next step: pick one provider, test one region + one target set, and only then expand geos and volume. That approach saves more money and time than chasing “cheapest per GB” on day one.

FAQ

What are the key factors for choosing the best proxy providers 2026?

Start with your workload (LLM enrichment, scraping, testing/monitoring, ads/accounts), then score providers on a few practical levers:

1. IP types (DC / Residential / ISP / Mobile),
2. targeting depth (country/city/ASN/ISP),
3. session control (rotating vs sticky, TTL options),
4. and reliability signals (success rate on your targets, latency variance, uptime transparency).

Also check auth options (user/pass, IP allowlist, tokens), observability (errors by domain, usage reporting, API access), and support (response time, clear escalation). Finally, verify basics that prevent buyer’s remorse: refund/replacement rules, acceptable-use clarity, and whether onboarding feels smooth for your stack.

How do I validate a provider before I commit to a bigger plan?

Run a small pilot with real targets, not a generic speed test. Pick 10–20 URLs across 2–3 domains and 2–3 geos, then run the exact flow you’ll ship (including retries, headers, and session handling). Track success rate, retry rate, median latency, and the top failure reasons (timeouts, blocks, CAPTCHAs, session drops). If you can stabilize the flow with clear knobs (sticky TTL, rotation rules, geo/ASN choice) and the dashboard makes issues obvious, the provider is a good fit. If you keep guessing and failures look random, scaling won’t fix it.

How do I compare plans across best proxy providers 2026 without getting tricked by “starting from” pricing?

Treat “from $X” as an entry benchmark, then compare by effective cost per successful request. Plans diverge on what actually drives spend: bandwidth billing vs per-IP billing, geo premiums, sticky session behavior, concurrency limits, and how retries impact usage. Do a quick math pass from your pilot: estimate total GB (payload size × volume × retry multiplier) and match that against each vendor’s billing model. The cheapest plan on paper often loses when retries spike or when you need stable sessions and tighter targeting.