Best Residential Proxy Networks (2026)

Residential proxy networks ranked on pool quality, targeting granularity, success rate and what a gigabyte actually costs at the volume you will buy.

Ranked by our editorial scores - how we rate providers. Updated August 20, 2026.

#1

Bright Data

9.0
Bright Data homepage

Best proxy network for hard targets and enterprise scale · from $8/GB

Bright Data is the reference implementation of a commercial proxy network: biggest pool, best targeting, best unblocking tools, highest price. If a target is genuinely hard, this is what works.

  • The largest and most reliable proxy pool in the industry, by a wide margin
  • Targeting down to city, ZIP and ASN, with carrier selection on mobile
  • Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser genuinely solve hard anti-bot problems
#2

Decodo

8.9
Decodo homepage

Best all-round proxy network for most buyers · from $2.50/GB · 14-day money-back

Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, is the default recommendation for anyone who is not an enterprise: half the price of the leaders, most of the capability, and a dashboard you can drive yourself.

  • The best balance of price, pool quality and usability in the market
  • Entry plans start around $11 a month, so small projects are viable
  • 14-day refund policy, which is rare among proxy networks
#3

Oxylabs

8.8
Oxylabs homepage

Best enterprise proxy network with real account support · from $4.50/GB

Oxylabs matches Bright Data on the things that matter for large-scale collection and beats it on support and documentation. Small buyers will still find the minimums unfriendly.

  • Closest competitor to Bright Data on pool size and success rate, with better support
  • Genuine effort on ethical sourcing, including an external advisory board
  • Excellent documentation, SDKs and dedicated account management
#4

Zyte

8.6
Zyte homepage

Best scraping platform for compliance-conscious teams · from $5/GB

Zyte comes from the people who wrote Scrapy, and it shows: smart per-target ban handling, real compliance credentials, and a route to managed data if you would rather not build.

  • Built by the team behind Scrapy, the standard open-source scraping framework
  • Automatic ban handling that picks the cheapest strategy that works per target
  • Strong legal and compliance posture, with published guidance on lawful collection
#5

IPRoyal

8.5
IPRoyal homepage

Best value residential proxies for small buyers · from $3.50/GB · 3-day money-back

IPRoyal is the small buyer's network: $7 gets you started, unused traffic never expires, and the static IP pricing undercuts almost everyone. Not the pool to bring to the hardest targets.

  • Residential traffic never expires, which is uniquely buyer-friendly in this market
  • Genuine entry point at $7, so tiny projects are viable
  • Static ISP and datacenter IPs are among the cheapest anywhere
#6

Apify

8.4
Apify homepage

Best platform for prebuilt scrapers and scheduled jobs · Free tier, paid from $8/GB

Apify is a full scraping platform with a marketplace of ready-made actors for popular sites. If someone has already built the scraper you need, this is the fastest path to data.

  • A marketplace of thousands of prebuilt scrapers, so common targets need no code at all
  • Full serverless platform: scheduling, storage, webhooks, monitoring and queues
  • Maintains Crawlee, a well-regarded open-source scraping library
#7

NetNut

8.4
NetNut homepage

Best static residential IPs for long sessions · from $3.50/GB

NetNut's ISP peering model produces the most stable static residential addresses in this directory. If your workload needs to hold one identity for hours, this is the network.

  • Direct ISP peering gives unusually stable, fast static residential IPs
  • One-hop architecture avoids the latency of routing through a peer device
  • Strong performance on long sticky sessions and account management workloads
#8

SOAX

8.3
SOAX homepage

Best mobile proxy pool with carrier targeting · from $4/GB

SOAX is strongest where mobile matters: a big carrier-targetable 4G and 5G pool, very long sticky sessions, and coverage in regions other networks skip.

  • Very large mobile pool with carrier-level targeting, a genuine specialty
  • Rotation control up to 24-hour sticky sessions, longer than most rivals
  • Cheap trial lets you evaluate properly before committing
#9

Webshare

8.2
Webshare homepage

Cheapest datacenter proxies and the only real free tier · Free tier, paid from $4.50/GB

Webshare is where you go when the target is undefended and the budget is small. Ten free proxies to start, and a hundred more for the price of a coffee.

  • A genuinely free tier of 10 proxies, which nobody else offers permanently
  • The cheapest datacenter proxies in the market by a wide margin
  • Instant self-serve signup with no sales contact
#10

Massive

8.0
Massive homepage

Best ethically sourced residential proxies · from $2.50/GB

Massive competes on consent rather than pool size, and does it credibly: disclosed opt-in, SOC 2 certification and clean IPs. The right pick when procurement asks how the IPs were obtained.

  • The clearest consent model in the industry, with disclosed monetization on the user side
  • SOC 2 Type II certified, which satisfies enterprise procurement
  • Good performance despite a smaller pool, because the IPs are cleaner
#11

Rayobyte

8.0
Rayobyte homepage

Best owned datacenter IP space with real support · from $6/GB · 2-day money-back

Rayobyte owns much of the datacenter space it sells, which shows up as better replacement policies and cleaner IP reputation. Residential is the weaker half.

  • Owns a large share of its datacenter IP space rather than reselling
  • Unusually flexible replacement policy on banned IPs
  • Scraping Robot includes 5,000 free scrapes a month
#12

ZenRows

8.0
ZenRows homepage

Best success rate against Cloudflare-protected sites · Free tier, paid from $6/GB

ZenRows focuses on the specific problem of modern anti-bot protection and does well at it, with a browser endpoint and raw proxies available from the same account.

  • Strong success rates against Cloudflare and similar protections
  • Scraping Browser endpoint for full interactive sessions
  • Sells raw residential proxies as well as the API

Frequently asked questions

What are residential proxies used for?

Price monitoring, ad verification, brand protection, market research, SEO tracking and large-scale public data collection, where a target site treats datacenter traffic differently from a home connection.

How much do residential proxies cost?

From about $1 per gigabyte at the budget end to $8 or more at the enterprise networks, falling with volume. Judge on cost per successful request, not on the headline rate.

Are residential proxies legal?

The technology is legal in most places. What you do with it may not be: scraping personal data, breaching a site's terms, or evading access controls can all carry legal risk. Get your own advice.