Buying guides
Proxy guides for every type, protocol and use case
59 independent guides covering residential, mobile 4G/5G, datacenter, ISP, SOCKS5 and HTTP proxies — what they are, what they cost and when each one is the right tool.
Residential proxies
Real consumer ISP IPs — the highest trust tier for hardened targets.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies route your traffic through real household IP addresses handed out by consumer ISPs, so target sites see an ordinary broadband customer instead of a server.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Rotating Residential Proxies
Rotating residential proxies assign a different household IP to each request (or each short interval), spreading a crawl across thousands of ISPs so no single address ever trips a rate limit.
$2 – $8 / GB
Static Residential Proxies
Static residential proxies (also sold as ISP proxies) give you a fixed IP registered to a consumer ISP but hosted in a datacenter — residential trust with server-grade speed and uptime.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
Residential Proxy Providers
There are well over a hundred residential proxy providers in 2026, but only a couple of dozen own real pools — the rest resell. This page explains how to tell them apart before you sign anything.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Residential IP Proxies
A residential IP proxy is defined by the address itself: an IPv4 allocated to a retail broadband subscriber, not to a hosting provider. That single attribute drives everything anti-bot systems decide about you.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Residential Proxy Comparison
Comparing residential proxies on advertised pool size is the fastest way to overpay. The only figures that matter are success rate on your targets, median latency and effective cost per successful request.
Compare $/GB and success rate
Residential Proxy Reviews
Most residential proxy reviews online are affiliate rewrites of a vendor's own feature list. Ours start with a paid account, a test harness and the same target set for every network.
Independent testing
Residential Proxy Pricing
Residential proxy pricing is almost universally per gigabyte, with steep volume discounts and a long list of things that quietly inflate the bill.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Residential Proxy Networks
A residential proxy network is the infrastructure behind the gateway: the peers, the routing layer, the health checks and the compliance process that decides which devices are allowed to carry your traffic.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Best Residential Proxies
The best residential proxies for you are the ones with the highest success rate on your targets at the lowest cost per successful request — not the ones with the biggest advertised pool.
$1.75 – $15 / GB
Residential Proxies for Web Scraping
For scraping projects that hit anti-bot walls, residential proxies are the difference between a 40% and a 95% success rate — provided the rest of your stack does not give you away.
$2 – $6 / GB
Residential Proxies for SEO
Accurate rank tracking needs a clean IP in the exact location you are reporting on. Residential proxies deliver localised, personalisation-free search results that datacenter ranges cannot fetch reliably.
$2 – $6 / GB
Residential Proxies for Social Media
Social platforms run the strictest risk engines on the web. Residential and mobile IPs, one identity per IP, and a stable browser fingerprint are the baseline for surviving more than a week.
$3 – $8 / GB or per IP
Residential Proxies for Account Farming
Multi-account operations live or die on isolation. Every profile needs its own IP, its own fingerprint and its own storage — sharing any one of the three links the accounts together.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
Residential Proxies for Automation
Automation frameworks — Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, n8n, Make — all accept proxy configuration, and residential exits keep those workflows from being blocked as bot traffic.
$2 – $8 / GB
Mobile 4G/5G proxies
Carrier-grade NAT IPs shared with thousands of real phones.
Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxies route traffic through cellular networks, so your exit IP is a carrier address shared with thousands of real phones behind carrier-grade NAT — the hardest IP class for a platform to block.
$40 – $120 / port / month
Mobile Proxy Providers
Mobile proxy providers split into two camps: operators running their own SIM and modem farms, and aggregators reselling ports from many small farms. The difference shows up in uptime and rotation reliability.
$40 – $120 / port / month
4G Mobile Proxies
4G LTE proxies remain the workhorse of the mobile proxy market: mature hardware, broad carrier coverage, dependable 20–60 Mbps throughput and the same CGNAT trust advantage as 5G at a lower price.
$40 – $90 / port / month
5G Mobile Proxies
5G proxies bring 100–500 Mbps throughput and sub-30ms latency to the mobile tier, which matters when your workflow uploads video or runs many browser sessions through one port.
$70 – $150 / port / month
LTE Mobile Proxies
LTE proxies are 4G ports described by their radio standard. They deliver carrier IPs from real SIM cards with the reliability that comes from a decade of hardware maturity.
$40 – $90 / port / month
Unlimited Mobile Proxies
Unlimited mobile proxies bill per port rather than per gigabyte, which makes them the only economical mobile option for bandwidth-heavy work — as long as you read the fair-use clause.
$50 – $150 / port / month
Rotating Mobile Proxies
Rotating mobile proxies hand you a fresh carrier IP per request or per interval from a shared pool of SIMs, giving mobile-grade trust without renting a dedicated port.
$6 – $20 / GB
Private Mobile Proxies
A private mobile proxy is a dedicated port that nobody else touches: your SIM, your IP, your rotation schedule and no neighbour traffic polluting the address history.
$60 – $150 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for Instagram
Instagram's risk engine is the strictest in mainstream social. Mobile proxies survive it best because the platform cannot ban a carrier IP without hitting thousands of genuine users on the same address.
$40 – $120 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for TikTok
TikTok is mobile-first by design, so a cellular exit is the most native network signal you can present — and the upload-heavy workflow makes 5G ports genuinely useful rather than a luxury.
$50 – $150 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for Facebook
Facebook and Meta Business Manager punish IP inconsistency harder than almost any platform. A stable mobile port per business identity is the most reliable way to keep ad accounts alive.
$45 – $130 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for Telegram
Telegram ties accounts to phone numbers and flags mass registrations from datacenter ranges. Mobile proxies present the same network class as an ordinary handset, which is exactly what the client expects.
$40 – $110 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for Traffic Arbitrage
Traffic arbitrage lives on ad accounts and accurate creative previews. Mobile proxies keep the accounts alive and show you the funnel exactly as a phone user in the target geo would see it.
$50 – $150 / port / month
Mobile Proxies for Affiliate Marketing
Affiliates need to see the offer page as the end user sees it and to keep network accounts separated. Mobile proxies solve both problems with one rental.
$45 – $130 / port / month
Datacenter proxies
Cheap, fast server IPs for volume work on tolerant targets.
Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies run on server IPs announced from hosting ASNs. They are the cheapest and fastest option by a wide margin, and perfectly adequate for any target that does not score IP reputation.
$0.30 – $3 / IP / month
Dedicated Datacenter Proxies
Dedicated datacenter proxies assign each IP to a single customer, so the only reputation the address carries is the one you build on it.
$1 – $3 / IP / month
Cheap Datacenter Proxies
Cheap shared datacenter proxies cost pennies per IP per month. They are excellent value for tolerant targets and a waste of money on anything with real anti-bot defence.
$0.30 – $1 / IP / month
Datacenter Proxy Providers
Datacenter proxy providers differ mainly in IP sourcing quality, subnet diversity and how quickly they replace burned addresses — not in raw speed, which is broadly identical.
$0.30 – $3 / IP / month
Datacenter Proxy Servers
A datacenter proxy server is the machine doing the forwarding — usually Squid, 3proxy, Dante or a cloud-native gateway running on a VPS with one or more public IPs attached.
$0.30 – $3 / IP / month
Datacenter Proxy Comparison
Datacenter proxies are commoditised on speed, so a useful comparison measures block rate, subnet diversity and replacement policy instead.
Compare $/IP and block rate
Datacenter Proxy Reviews
Our datacenter proxy reviews report the numbers that actually vary between vendors: subnet spread, blocklist hit rate, replacement responsiveness and real success rates on live targets.
Independent testing
Datacenter Proxy Pricing
Datacenter proxies bill per IP per month with unlimited bandwidth, which flips the cost model completely versus residential per-GB economics.
$0.30 – $3 / IP / month
IPv4 Datacenter Proxies
IPv4 datacenter proxies remain the default because every site on the internet accepts IPv4, while IPv6 support is still patchy outside large platforms.
$0.50 – $3 / IP / month
IPv6 Datacenter Proxies
IPv6 datacenter proxies cost a fraction of IPv4 because address space is effectively unlimited — a single allocation yields more addresses than the entire IPv4 internet.
$0.01 – $0.20 / IP / month
ISP / Static residential proxies
Datacenter speed on ISP-registered IPs you keep for months.
ISP Proxies
ISP proxies combine the two things you normally have to choose between: an IP registered to a consumer ISP and hardware in a datacenter with gigabit uplinks and unlimited bandwidth.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
Static ISP Proxies
Static ISP proxies are fixed addresses you keep for the whole billing period — no rotation, no session TTL, no surprise IP change halfway through a checkout.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
ISP Residential Proxies
ISP residential proxies is the marketing name for static residential: consumer-ISP IP registration on datacenter infrastructure, sold per IP with unlimited traffic.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
ISP Proxy Providers
ISP proxy providers are judged on the quality of the ranges they lease, the countries they cover and how fast they replace an IP that a platform has flagged.
$2 – $6 / IP / month
ISP Proxy Comparison
Comparing ISP proxies means comparing the ranges behind them: which ISP, which country, what fraud score and how the target platform classifies the address.
Compare $/IP and ASN quality
ISP Proxy Reviews
Our ISP proxy reviews test the ranges, not the landing page: ASN verification, platform login behaviour, latency, uptime and how support responds when an IP goes bad.
Independent testing
SOCKS5 proxies
Protocol-agnostic tunnelling with UDP and any-port support.
SOCKS5 Proxies
SOCKS5 is a transport-layer proxy protocol: it forwards raw TCP and UDP packets without touching the payload, so it carries any application traffic, not just HTTP.
$0.50 / IP – $6 / GB
SOCKS5 Proxy Providers
Almost every serious proxy network exposes a SOCKS5 endpoint alongside HTTP, but only some support UDP, and that single detail decides whether the product fits your use case.
$0.50 / IP – $6 / GB
Buy SOCKS5 Proxies
Buying SOCKS5 proxies means choosing two things at once: the protocol endpoint and the IP class behind it — datacenter, ISP, residential or mobile.
$0.50 / IP – $6 / GB
Best SOCKS5 Proxies
The best SOCKS5 proxies pair a clean IP pool with a genuinely complete protocol implementation: UDP ASSOCIATE, username and password auth, IPv6 support and remote DNS.
$0.50 / IP – $6 / GB
Cheap SOCKS5 Proxies
Cheap SOCKS5 proxies are almost always shared datacenter IPs. They are fine for peer-to-peer, personal tooling and internal automation, and unreliable everywhere reputation is checked.
$0.30 – $1.50 / IP / month
Dedicated SOCKS5 Proxies
A dedicated SOCKS5 proxy is a fixed IP nobody else uses, exposed over the SOCKS5 protocol — the right choice whenever a session, a login or a whitelist depends on the address staying the same.
$1 – $6 / IP / month
Residential SOCKS5 Proxies
Residential SOCKS5 proxies expose a peer-based residential pool over the SOCKS5 protocol, so you get household IP trust for applications that are not HTTP.
$2 – $8 / GB
Mobile SOCKS5 Proxies
Mobile SOCKS5 proxies expose a 4G or 5G port over SOCKS5, which is exactly what messenger clients, desktop app wrappers and mobile emulators expect.
$40 – $130 / port / month
SOCKS5 Proxy Comparison
A SOCKS5 comparison has to cover two dimensions at once: how good the IP pool is, and how complete the SOCKS5 implementation is.
Compare protocol depth and pool
SOCKS5 Proxy Reviews
Our SOCKS5 reviews verify the protocol claims vendors make: we open real TCP and UDP sessions, check DNS handling and measure connection limits under load.
Independent testing
HTTP / HTTPS proxies
The default web protocol layer supported by every scraping stack.
HTTP Proxies
HTTP proxies operate at the application layer: they understand requests, can rewrite headers, cache responses and enforce rules — which is exactly why every scraping framework defaults to them.
$0.30 / IP – $6 / GB
HTTPS Proxies
An HTTPS proxy either tunnels TLS traffic with CONNECT or accepts an encrypted connection from the client to the proxy itself — two different things vendors label identically.
$0.30 / IP – $6 / GB
HTTP Proxy Providers
Every proxy network sells HTTP endpoints, so vendor selection comes down to pool quality, gateway features and how much of the retry logic they handle for you.
$0.30 / IP – $6 / GB
HTTP Proxy Comparison
The only honest way to compare HTTP proxies is cost per successful request on your own targets, measured with an identical harness across every candidate.
Compare $ per 1k successful requests