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There’s a lot of information to take in when shopping for a proxy server. Here’s what you should look for when comparing your options.

Proxy type

There are four main types of proxy servers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Confusingly, many companies list them under different names, and you sometimes have the option to purchase dedicated or shared proxies as a subset of proxy types. 

Residential

Residential proxy servers are the most popular proxy types available because of their high-quality IPs and large proxy pools. These come from real devices around the world with IP addresses assigned by internet service providers (ISPs), which makes them less likely to be blocked than datacenter and ISP proxies. That makes them a great choice for popular targets like Amazon, Instagram and Google.

Common use cases:

• Web scraping
• Ad verification
• SEO monitoring
• Limited-edition purchases

Mobile

Mobile proxies are generally considered to have the highest-quality IPs and therefore the most difficult to block. Your connection requests are routed to devices connected to wireless carriers and are often used for sophisticated targets like social media sites. You’ll typically pay almost double for mobile proxies compared to residential.   

Common use cases:

• Social media automation
• Website and app testing

ISP

Also called “static residential” proxies, ISP proxies sit somewhere between datacenter and residential servers. Like residential proxy servers, they’re owned by internet providers but they’re hosted at datacenters, not the devices of end users themselves. These are generally faster than residential and mobile proxies, and with a higher uptime, but they’re more likely to be blocked. 

Common use cases:

• Web scraping
• Managing multiple e-commerce accounts
• Sneaker copping

Datacenter

The cheapest proxy type, and the most likely to be flagged as suspicious by target sites. These live on servers owned by web hosting companies like AWS and Google Cloud. These proxy types have speedy performance but they’re the easiest for websites to detect. Most datacenter proxy servers charge by the number of IPs rather than data usage, but some companies offer both options.

Common use cases:

• Large-scale web scraping
• Price aggregation
• Market research

Dedicated vs. shared

Shared proxies are IP addresses that are controlled by multiple users at the same time, while dedicated IPs are used exclusively by one user at a time. Shared proxies are typically much cheaper than dedicated proxies, but speeds are much slower and you might be sharing IPs with some bad neighbors, which could cause the proxy to be banned on specific websites.  

Proxy pool

A proxy pool refers to the number of IP addresses that a company has available for customers to use. When you buy data from Oxylabs’ residential plans, for example, you’ll automatically be connected to a rotating collection of 175 million IP addresses. A larger proxy pool can share traffic and lower the chances that a single IP will be blocked. 

Fewer IPs in a pool also means fewer locations that you can target. Even though most proxy companies have over a million IPs at their disposal, a smaller proxy pool might not give you the ability to target the specific country or city that your project requires.  

IP quality

A large proxy pool doesn’t necessarily guarantee better results. Not all IPs are created equal, and some pools have a higher percentage of proxies that are more likely to be flagged as fraudulent. To see how each proxy company compares in this metric, I’d recommend taking a look at Proxyway’s 2025 Market Research Report. The company analyzed pools from the top proxy servers and applied an industry standard called IPQualityScore (IPQS), which is commonly used in fraud prevention, risk analysis and threat detection. 

Generally, any IP addresses with an IPQS score above 90 face a higher likelihood of being blocked by a website. Even the best proxy servers consist of a majority of IPs with IPQS scores over 90. The less of these IPs a proxy server has -- and the more IPs in total -- the more likely your requests will be successful. 

Proxy sourcing

Many proxy servers list their IP addresses as “ethically sourced,” and while that might sound like empty marketing fluff, it actually has some practical implications for your projects. Ethically sourced essentially means that people or businesses are aware that their IP addresses are being used, they give their explicit consent and they’re being compensated for it. All three of our top picks provide a commitment to abiding by these tenets when sourcing their proxies.

In addition to being the right thing to do, proxies sourced without consent can expose a user to liability or grind a business’s operations to a halt through mass blocklisting of a proxy’s IP pool. Any reputable proxy server should have a clear policy on its website for how it sources IP addresses; if it doesn’t, you should pass it over.

Cost and discounts

Proxy server pricing can be incredibly complicated. Some companies charge by the IP for certain proxy types, others by data use and some give you both options. In general, the per-GB price goes down the more you spend. Some providers also offer discounted prices if you commit to annual payments instead of monthly.

If you’re not sure where to start, I’d recommend purchasing one GB and running a few tests to gauge how much data you’ll require. Most proxy servers, including all of our top picks, also offer some sort of free trial, but you may have to contact a sales representative to access it. 

Developer tools and third-party integrations

If you’re already using software for activities like web scraping or market research, there’s a decent chance that a proxy server out there has an integration with it. Oxylabs had the largest collection of tools for developers of any proxy server I tested, but it’s worth poking around for specific integrations before you commit to purchasing a large amount of data.

We scored proxy servers in five categories for this review, assigning a different weight to each one. Here’s what we considered for each one. 

Proxy pool

This one is relatively straightforward: How many IP addresses does each proxy company have at its disposal? Size isn’t everything in proxy pools, but it is worth something. A deeper roster of IPs means your requests are more likely to go through successfully, and they give you greater control over your target locations. Some proxy servers let you choose IPs by specific ZIP codes, while others are missing entire countries. We gave more weight to residential and mobile proxies than datacenter and ISPs in this category, as those are harder to come by. 

Weight: 15%

Fraud scores 

The raw numbers are important with proxy pools, but how many of those IPs are likely to get past bot detection measures? For this metric, we relied heavily on Proxyway’s 2025 Market Research Report, which analyzed the residential pools from top proxy servers and applied an industry standard called IPQualityScore (IPQS). The higher the percentage of proxies with scores below 75 -- these are less likely to be considered suspicious -- the higher the score we gave it.

Weight: 15%

Performance

For this section, we focused on two metrics. Infrastructure success rate measures how often requests reach their end destination through the proxy, while response time measures how long it takes each proxy to do it. We also used Proxyway’s 2025 Market Research Report for this data, which sent out more than 1.5 million requests to top proxy servers this year. Both success rate and response time were combined for our performance score.

We also considered success rates with popular targets like Amazon, Google and Instagram, which are usually better at blocking IPs that they identify as proxies. All three of our top picks had success rates at 92% or above for these websites. 

Weight: 30%

Value

This score captures how much data -- or how many IPs, for datacenter and ISP proxies -- you get for your money. Some proxy servers offer slightly different data packages, which we normalized using a per-GB price for three tiers: one GB, 500GB and 1,000GB. We gave more weight to residential and mobile proxies here, as these are the most sought-after proxy types in the industry these days. 

Weight: 25%

User experience

While our other metrics were informed entirely by hard data, this section was a little more subjective. I spent at least a day setting up and using each proxy server I tested, taking note of how easy the setup process was, whether the proxy server came with helpful features like a browser extension and how useful the data dashboards were.

I also contacted each company’s customer support with some basic questions. These were almost always web chats that started off with AI agents -- I couldn’t find a single proxy server that had a phone number listed -- but some were better than others. The best proxy servers allowed you to connect with an actual human in the chat without having to wait hours or days for a response. 

Weight: 15%

In total, I tested 16 proxy servers for this review. Some, like Storm Proxies and Packet Stream, were eliminated right off the bat because they didn’t disclose a clear policy on how their proxies were sourced. The rest of these proxy servers didn’t quite beat out our top picks, but they’re still worth a look. 

Soax

This was the hardest cut of the bunch. Soax came in third in most of our important metrics, but it was hard to find a reason to recommend it over Oxylabs or Decodo. Soax has an impressive 155 million IPs in its residential proxy pool -- behind only Oxylabs -- and it ranked third in Proxyway’s fraud score analysis. I also found its web interface and documentation to be some of the best of the bunch, but those didn’t quite tip the scales enough to break into our top picks.

Score: 8.8/10

DataImpulse

While DataImpulse has the cheapest mobile proxies I saw, that wasn’t quite compelling enough to look past its flaws. Its fraud score from Proxyway was close to the bottom, and it doesn’t have a particularly large residential pool to begin with. Confusingly, DataImpulse’s more expensive “premium” plans actually had a worse fraud score than its basic option. That said, if you’re looking exclusively for mobile proxies, it is worth considering. These plans had solid success rates, especially with popular targets, but response times were a glacial 1.42 seconds. 

Score: 7.6/10

Massive

While I enjoyed using Massive’s proxy servers overall, it has one fatal flaw: the smallest residential proxy pool I saw at just 1 million. These are extremely high-quality proxies, to be sure -- Massive received our best ranking for fraud score -- but with so many fewer IPs than the competition, it’s hard to recommend. And while Massive touts its ethical sourcing all over its website, it doesn’t list compensation as one of its tenets in its sourcing policy, which all three of our top picks do. 

Score: 7.1/10

IPRoyal

IPRoyal was serviceable in almost every category, but it didn’t necessarily stand out to me, either. Its residential pool is modest at 32 million and it consists of an above-average percentage of IPs that are likely to be blocked. That said, its prices are very competitive, and you also have the option to pay by the length of time with its mobile, datacenter and ISP proxies -- a nice feature if you have a short-term project you’re working on. 

Score: 6.7/10

Bright Data

Bright Data has the third-largest residential proxy pool of any company at 150 million, with IPs in every country in the world and precise location filtering options. Its IPs ranked in the middle of the pack for fraud score, with an average global IPQS score of 44.52 and 71.76 in the US. (Remember, anything below 75 is unlikely to be considered suspicious.) Ultimately, it wasn’t quite as high-performing as Decodo and Oxylabs or as cheap as Webshare, so it didn’t make our top picks during this round of testing.

Score: 6.6/10

NetNut

NetNut is clearly targeted toward businesses with a high appetite for data. It’s one of the few proxy companies that doesn’t offer a pay-as-you-go option; the cheapest rotating residential plan available is $84 per month for 28GB. That $3-per-GB price point is attractive, but you’re not getting the highest quality IPs for that price. The only company that fared worse in Proxyway’s fraud score analysis was DataImpulse’s Premium tier. 

Score: 5.3/10