Best Residential Proxy Providers 2026: Every List Is Written by a Seller

Search for the best residential proxy providers and you will get a page of confident rankings. Almost all of them were written by companies that sell proxies.

That is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is a description of the market. Vendors are the only people with a commercial reason to publish a 3,000-word comparison of this category, so they are the people who publish them — and one of them currently ranks itself first.

We sell search data, not bandwidth, so we have no runner in this race. What follows is what a buyer can actually verify: who publishes the lists, what ten providers charge according to their own pricing pages today, which claims have never been audited by anyone, and the questions worth asking before you hand over a card.

Who writes the lists you are reading

Start with the SERP itself, because it is the part of this topic nobody documents.

Observed 13 August 2026, on a bare Google query with no location or language parameters set: the term returned an AI Overview, a People Also Ask block, and eight organic results. Seven of the eight were published by companies that sell proxies. One vendor's own comparison page held the top slot. The single result not published by a seller was a Reddit thread.

Two honest caveats. Results vary by country, by person and by hour — ours resolved to an India-localised SERP, and yours will differ, which is exactly why the query is worth running yourself rather than taking our word for it. And a page written by a vendor is not automatically wrong; several of those comparisons contain accurate pricing and genuinely useful detail.

But it does mean something specific for a buyer. When ten pages disagree about who is best, the disagreement is not evidence that the question is hard. It is evidence that ten different companies have ten different things to sell.

The nearest thing to an independent voice in this category is Proxyway, which runs its own tests and publishes methodology. It also states plainly on its ranking page: "We use affiliate links. They let us sustain ourselves at no cost to you." That disclosure is more than most of the category offers, and it is still a commercial relationship with the companies being ranked.

The ranking that still lists a seized network

Here is what happens when rankings are not maintained, and it is the clearest illustration this market has produced.

On 3 July 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group, the FBI and Lumen disrupted NetNut, described in Google's own write-up as "among the largest and most popular residential proxy networks." The associated botnet was estimated at "at least 2 million devices, distributed across the world." In a single week that June, Google observed "316 distinct threat clusters using suspected NetNut exit nodes, including cybercriminal and espionage groups."

Checked today, 13 August 2026: netnut.io serves a seizure notice headed "Seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation." There is no website left to buy from.

Also checked today: Proxyway's residential rankings, last updated 8 July 2026 — five days after the disruption — still list NetNut at number nine, between Evomi and Infatica.

Again, this is not a claim that Proxyway did anything wrong. Keeping a twelve-provider ranking current against a market this volatile is genuinely hard, and they at least publish a date so a reader can see the staleness. The lesson is for the reader, not the publisher: a ranking is a photograph, and this market moves faster than the photographs get retaken. Check that the provider you are about to pay still exists, on its own domain, today.

What ten providers charge, verified today

Every number in this table was read off the vendor's own live pricing page on 13 August 2026. Prices in this category change without notice, so treat the date as part of the data — and re-check before you buy.

Three things in that table are worth more than the individual numbers.

The entry point and the headline rate are different products. Evomi advertises $0.49/GB and its smallest paid plan is $49.99. Both are true. Which one describes your bill depends entirely on whether you will use 100 GB in a month. We take that apart properly in the companion piece on what residential proxies actually cost per GB, which prices all ten at 5 GB, 50 GB and 1 TB a month.

Six of the ten pages do not say whether your traffic expires. That is the single most expensive unstated term in this category: unused bandwidth that quietly dies at the end of a billing period converts a good rate into a bad one. Only IPRoyal, Rayobyte and DataImpulse state on the page that traffic does not expire; Massive states that it rolls over; SOAX states plainly that credits die after 60 days, which is more honest than silence even though it is the least generous policy of the five.

Two vendors do not price in gigabytes at all. SOAX bills credits against country tiers, so the same gigabyte costs different amounts depending on where the IP sits. That is defensible — tier-1 IPs genuinely cost more to source — but it means you cannot compare SOAX to a flat per-GB vendor without knowing your own country mix first.

If you are trying to work out what any of this does to a scraping budget rather than a proxy bill, our breakdown of the true cost of running your own Google scraper puts bandwidth next to the other line items, and the hidden costs of SERP APIs covers the same trap on the data side.

Everyone advertises a pool size. Nobody audits one

Pool size is the number every vendor leads with, and it is the number with the least evidence behind it.

Checked on their own pages, 13 August 2026:

The only independent measurement anybody has published is Proxyway's pool test, last updated 17 January 2022 on research that dates from 2020. It sampled roughly 400,000 to 500,000 connection requests per provider over five to seven days and counted the unique IPs that came back: 226,000 unique IPs against Oxylabs' then-advertised 60M, 76,000 against Luminati's 72M, 211,000 against Smartproxy's 10M, 207,000 against NetNut's 5M.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to misuse. A test that issues 500,000 requests cannot observe more than 500,000 IPs, so those counts are bounded by the sample, not a census of the pool. What the test shows is not "the pool is 226,000 IPs" but "here is what a heavy user actually saw in a week." It is also four years old, on a market that has since had at least one of its largest networks seized. It cannot describe today's pools, and anyone citing it as though it can is misreading it.

Which leaves the honest position: no residential IP pool has ever been independently audited, the numbers on the marketing pages are unverifiable by construction, and the one attempt to measure them is stale. Proxyway itself noted at the end of that test that next time it would check whether providers had duplicate IP addresses between them. That follow-up has not been published.

The practical version for a buyer: pool size is not a purchasing criterion, because you cannot verify it and it does not predict what you care about. Success rate on your actual targets does, and that you can measure yourself in an afternoon on a trial. Our notes on why proxies get banned by Google and fixing 429 "unusual traffic" errors cover what that testing should look for.

Three tiers, and what actually separates them

Strip out the branding and the market sorts into three groups. The separator is not quality — it is who you have to become to get the good rate.

Enterprise. Bright Data, Oxylabs, SOAX. Published rates are high at the bottom of the curve and competitive at the top: Oxylabs' 1 TB plan works out at $2.50/GB, SOAX's enterprise tier-1 rate at $0.85. You get compliance paperwork, support, and account management. You also get minimums — SOAX's cheapest paid plan is $200 a month — and pricing that is genuinely negotiable above a terabyte, which means the published number is an opening position rather than a price.

Mid-market. Decodo, Massive, IPRoyal. Rates in the $2–8 range depending on volume, low or no minimums, self-serve signup. This is where most scraping teams actually live, and it is the tier where the differences between vendors are smallest and the switching cost is lowest.

Budget. Webshare, Evomi, Rayobyte, DataImpulse. Sub-$2/GB is achievable here, sometimes far below. The trade is that the cheap rate usually requires either volume (Rayobyte's $0.50 needs 5,000 GB) or a prepaid block (Evomi's $0.49 needs the 100 GB plan). Webshare's free tier — 10 proxies and 1 GB a month, indefinitely — is the cheapest way in this whole market to find out whether a residential IP even solves your problem.

What does not reliably separate the tiers: pool size claims, "ethically sourced" language, which are near-universal and unverifiable. If you want the tier question one level down — whether you need this class of IP at all rather than a cheaper one — that is a different decision, and we work through it in residential vs datacenter proxies for SERP scraping.

What to check before you buy

Six checks, in the order that saves the most money.

• Does the vendor still exist, today? Open the domain. This sounds facetious; it is the single check that would have caught the NetNut case, and it takes four seconds.
• What is the smallest amount you can spend? Not the per-GB rate — the minimum. At low volume the minimum is the price, and it varies from $3.50 to $200 across the table above.
• Does unused traffic expire, and is that written down? If the pricing page does not say, ask before paying and keep the answer in writing. Six of ten pages we checked are silent on this.
• Whose network is it? Proxyway's 2026 market research states that the market "supports only 10 to 15 companies with their own networks" and that "even then, a half of them overlap to various extents due to sharing upstream sources." Buying two providers for redundancy may buy the same IPs twice.
• Does the vendor publish raw test data, or only conclusions? This is the question that separates a benchmark from an advertisement, and it applies to us too. A comparison without its underlying data is an opinion with a table around it.
• Measure success rate on your targets, not on a generic one. Block behaviour is target-specific. A pool that sails through one site can fail on another the same hour, which is the whole subject of scraping Google without getting blocked.

Two more, if you are early enough in the decision to still be scoping it: check whether you need this at all — the free limits you get without any proxy are higher than most people assume. And if you have already chosen a vendor, rotating versus sticky sessions usually moves your success rate more than switching provider would.

Where we sit, and what we are not telling you

Fair is fair: we are not disinterested either.

We publish this on the blog of a company that sells a SERP API. If you conclude that buying bandwidth and maintaining your own scrapers is more work than it is worth, that conclusion happens to be good for us. You should weigh this page accordingly, exactly as you weigh a vendor's ranking.

What we can say is what we have not done. None of the links on this page are affiliate links, and we earn nothing if you sign up with any company named here. We have not ranked these providers, because ranking them would require running the same workload through all ten, and we have not done that. Every figure above is either quoted from a vendor's own page on a stated date or attributed to a named third-party source. Where we could not verify something — pool sizes, most notably — we have said so rather than repeating the claim.

That is a lower bar than "we tested all ten." It is also the bar most of this category fails, which is the actual finding here.

FAQ

Which residential proxy provider is best for web scraping?

There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one without showing its test data is guessing or selling. What the published prices do support is a structural answer: below about 10 GB a month the entry minimum dominates your bill, so the provider with the lowest minimum wins regardless of its headline rate; between roughly 50 GB and 1 TB the per-GB rate starts to matter more than the minimum; above 1 TB every vendor on this page negotiates, so the list price is a starting position rather than a quote. Pick the tier your actual monthly volume falls into first, then compare only the providers that price sensibly inside it.

Why do best residential proxy lists disagree with each other so much?

Because most of them are published by companies with a stake in the outcome. On a bare Google query for this term on 13 August 2026, seven of the eight organic results were published by companies that sell proxies, including one vendor ranking itself in first place. The remaining slot was a Reddit thread. Independent review sites exist, but the most established of them discloses that it earns affiliate commission on the providers it ranks. None of that makes any individual ranking wrong; it does mean the disagreement between them is not evidence of a hard question, it is evidence of different commercial incentives.

How much do residential proxies cost in 2026?

Verified against the vendors' own pricing pages on 13 August 2026, published rates run from about $0.50 per GB at the very top of the volume curve to $8.00 per GB at entry level. Bright Data lists pay-as-you-go at $8 per GB, discounted to $4.00 with a coupon. Oxylabs starts at $30 for 5 GB. Massive starts at $80 for 10 GB. Evomi's entry plan is $49.99 for 100 GB. Rayobyte runs from $3.50 per GB down to about $0.50 per GB above 5,000 GB, and DataImpulse lists $1.00 per GB with a $5 minimum. The headline rate is rarely what a small buyer pays, because entry minimums and expiring traffic move the real number a long way.

Are advertised proxy pool sizes accurate?

Nobody knows, because no provider's pool size has been independently audited. Checked on 13 August 2026, Bright Data advertises over 400M, Oxylabs 175M+, Decodo 115M+, DataImpulse 90M+ and Webshare 80M+, and not one of those pages cites an audit of the figure. The only independent measurement anyone has published is Proxyway's, last updated in January 2022, which sampled 400,000 to 500,000 connection requests per provider over a few days and recorded far fewer unique IPs than the advertised totals. That test is four years old and its sample bounds what it could possibly have counted, so it cannot describe today's pools either. Treat every pool-size number as marketing until someone audits one.

Is it a problem if a provider resells another network's IPs?

It is a risk worth pricing, and it is more common than the market's branding suggests. Proxyway's 2026 market research states that the market supports only 10 to 15 companies with their own networks, and that even among those, a half of them overlap to various extents due to sharing upstream sources. It also identified at least 56 companies that emerged between 2025 and March 2026, and described the new residential vendors as predominantly white labels. The practical consequence is that buying from two providers for redundancy may buy you the same IPs twice, and that a disruption upstream can take out vendors that look unrelated.