01
Oxylabs
9.8/10 · from $8.00/GBEnterprise-grade SOCKS5 with the largest tested residential pool.
Why it ranks here: Highest measured success rate on tier-1 retail and search targets, with city and ASN targeting that actually resolves.
Best Proxies · Updated 2026-07-28
The Best Residential Proxies of 2026
Twelve residential networks benchmarked on success rate, pool overlap, latency and effective cost per successful GB.
Residential proxies route requests through consumer ISP connections, which is why they still clear the strictest anti-bot stacks when datacenter ranges cannot. The trade-off is price and variance: two networks quoting the same dollar-per-gigabyte figure can differ by 30 percentage points in success rate on the same target.
We ran scheduled requests from four regions for 30 days against retail, travel, search and social targets, and ranked networks on the number that matters — effective cost per successful gigabyte, after retries.
The ranked picks
02
Bright Data
9.6/10 · from $8.40/GBThe most feature-rich proxy network with granular targeting.
Why it ranks here: The deepest pool and the most granular targeting controls; best when coverage matters more than price.
03
Decodo
8.6/10 · from $4.50/GBNew-gen SOCKS5 with clean UI and honest per-GB pricing.
Why it ranks here: Best balance of price and reliability for mid-size crawlers running steady daily volume.
04
SOAX
9.1/10 · from $6.60/GBClean residential and mobile SOCKS5 with per-second billing.
Why it ranks here: Strong mobile-plus-residential mix and clean filtering by carrier, city and ASN.
05
NodeMaven
9.3/10 · from $3.99/GBQuality-filtered residential and mobile proxies with the cleanest IP scoring.
Why it ranks here: Aggressive IP-quality filtering keeps ban rates low on social and account-heavy workloads.
06
IPRoyal
8.8/10 · from $1.75/GBCheap, honest SOCKS5 with a strong pay-per-GB residential offer.
Why it ranks here: Pay-as-you-go traffic that never expires — the sane pick for irregular workloads.
07
IPFly
9.1/10 · from $0.80/GB90M+ residential pool with static ISP and datacenter proxies at value pricing.
Why it ranks here: Competitive entry pricing with residential, ISP and datacenter under one dashboard.
How we tested
Success rate
Median success on tier-1 targets over 30 days of scheduled requests from four regions.
Pool quality
Unique IPs seen per 100k requests, ASN diversity and duplicate-subnet rate.
Latency
Time to first byte measured against a control endpoint, p50 and p95.
Pricing
Effective cost per successful GB, not headline rate-card pricing.
Compliance
Sourcing disclosure, KYC posture and abuse handling.
Scores are recomputed whenever a vendor changes pricing, sourcing or infrastructure. This list was last verified on 2026-07-28. We earn commission from some links on this page; placement is decided from test data before any commercial terms are discussed.
Frequently asked questions
How much do residential proxies cost in 2026?+
Entry pricing sits between $1.50 and $4 per GB for mid-tier networks, and $7–$12 per GB for enterprise pools with strict sourcing controls. Annual commitments typically cut 30–50%.
Are residential proxies legal?+
Using them is legal in most jurisdictions. What matters is what you collect and how: respect robots.txt where it governs your crawler, avoid authenticated or personal data you have no right to, and follow the target's terms.
Rotating or sticky sessions?+
Rotate per request for wide crawls; use 10–30 minute sticky sessions for checkout, login or any multi-step flow where a mid-flow IP change looks like fraud.
How do I test a residential network before buying?+
Buy the smallest package, run 5,000 requests against your real target, and record success rate, p95 latency and unique-IP count. Headline pool size tells you nothing about your target.
