Best Residential Proxies in 2026: 9 Providers Tested & Compared

TL;DR

• Best overall: Decodo takes the top spot, combining a 99.92% success rate with a 0.53-second response time in Proxyway's independent benchmark – the strongest price-to-performance balance on this list.
• Best budget picks: Evomi and ProxyEmpire start at under $1.5/GB, making them attractive for cost-conscious projects, though you'll sacrifice some pool size and advanced targeting options.
• Best rotation control: Decodo and Oxylabs stand out for flexible rotation, offering per-request, session-based, and time-based options rather than locking you into a single rotation mode.
• How we tested: Our rankings prioritize independent, continuously updated benchmarks, including Proxyway's market research and AIMultiple's live testing, over vendor-reported performance claims.
• Bottom line: There's no single best residential proxy for every project. Choose based on your workload, targeting requirements, performance needs, and budget, then run a trial before committing.

Top picks by use case

Not every project needs the same residential proxy. Here's where each provider on this list fits best:

• Best overall – Decodo. The strongest all-around option, with a 99.92% independent success rate at a mid-market price.
• Best for web scraping – Decodo or Oxylabs. Both offer large residential proxy pools and strong, consistent performance on challenging targets.
• Best budget picks – Evomi and ProxyEmpire. Both offer cheap residential proxies starting at under $1/GB, making them good options for cost-sensitive workloads.
• Best rotating residential proxies – Decodo. Offers per-request, sticky-session, and time-based rotation options in a single plan, giving you more control over how and when your IP changes. Sticky sessions can be especially useful for ad verification. They let you maintain the same IP and location long enough to verify what an actual local user would see.
• Best enterprise pick – Oxylabs. A strong fit for large-scale operations that need extensive proxy pools, detailed configuration, and enterprise-grade compliance.
• Best for testing – Decodo or Rayobyte. Decodo offers a 3-day, 100 MB free trial, while Rayobyte offers pay-as-you-go plans for testing the service without committing to a subscription.

How we evaluated residential proxies

We scored every provider on 5 criteria. Each one affects your success rate and your bill differently, so it's worth understanding what each actually measures.

• Pool size and diversity. A bigger pool of IPs means more fallback options when addresses get flagged or blocked. Diversity across ASNs (the networks that IPs belong to) and device types matters more than the raw IP count.
• Performance. Success rate is the share of requests that return a valid response instead of an error or a block. Response time is how long it takes for a single request to complete. A best residential proxy provider needs to score well on both, not just one.
• Rotation and session control. Rotation swaps out your IP address on a schedule or per request. Session control (often called "sticky sessions") lets you hold one IP for a set period, which matters for tasks like account logins.
• Pricing model and trial. Most providers bill per GB of traffic. Look for a trial or money-back period so you can test a provider against your actual targets before paying full price.
• Trust. This covers ethical IP sourcing, compliance certifications, and vendor continuity. NetNut, for example, still appears on some 2026 comparison lists despite a well-documented law-enforcement seizure of its infrastructure – a reminder to check a provider's track record, not just its specs.

Our rankings prioritize independent, continuously updated benchmarks, including Proxyway's annual market research and AIMultiple's live testing, rather than performance figures reported by vendors themselves. Independent measurements provide a more consistent basis for comparison, so we rely on them wherever they're available rather than presenting vendor claims as our own results.

For a deeper look at the technology behind these services, see our guide to how residential proxies work, along with our ethical sourcing standards for a closer look at what responsible IP sourcing means in practice.

Best residential proxy providers in 2026

1. Decodo

Decodo covers more than 195 locations and takes the top spot for a simple reason: it combines strong performance, consistency, and mid-market pricing. In Proxyway's benchmark, Decodo recorded a 99.92% success rate with a 0.53-second response time, giving it the best price-to-performance ratio in the test.

• Pool: 115M+ residential IPs, up 110% year-over-year.
• Pricing: $3/GB on the 2GB plan, dropping to $2/GB on the 1,000GB plan.
• Rotation: Per-request, sticky-session, and time-interval options. That makes it particularly flexible if you need both frequent IP changes and longer-lived sessions.
• Trial: Three days and 100MB free for proxies, plus a seven-day, 1,000-request trial for the Web Scraping API.

Pro: The strongest independently verified success rate on this list.

Con: Its pool is large but smaller than those of Oxylabs and SOAX, which could matter for very high-volume workloads that cycle through large numbers of IPs.

2. Oxylabs

Oxylabs sets the benchmark for residential proxy pool size, with more than 175 million unique IPs. It's built for large-scale, enterprise scraping, with advanced targeting and filtering options that let you narrow traffic by factors such as device type, fraud score, and subnet.

Pro: The largest verified residential proxy pool on this list, along with some of the most comprehensive compliance documentation.

Con: It trails Decodo by roughly 70 milliseconds globally in median response time and costs around $500 more per TB at scale. See our full Oxylabs comparison for a detailed side-by-side breakdown.

3. SOAX

SOAX combines a 155M+ residential IP pool with AI-driven routing, making it a strong option for large-scale scraping and performance testing. Its 0.55-second median response time in the US is the fastest region-specific result on this list.

Pro: Fast US performance and strong device diversity across its residential pool.

Con: It costs roughly the same as Decodo at scale, but has slower average response times outside the US. See our SOAX comparison.

4. Bright Data 

Bright Data doubled the size of its residential proxy pool in 2026 and stands out for the breadth of its product offering. Alongside its core proxy network, it provides tools such as a scraping browser and datasets, making it a strong choice if you need more than proxy infrastructure. The company also places significant emphasis on compliance and ethical IP sourcing.

Pro: It has the broadest product suite on this list, particularly for teams that need proxies alongside scraping and data products.

Con: Its 1.12-second response time and 98.96% success rate trail Decodo, Oxylabs, and SOAX in the benchmarks used for this ranking. See our Bright Data alternatives comparison for a direct side-by-side look.

5. Webshare 

Webshare is a good fit for self-service, budget-conscious projects that still need granular API and rotation controls without the complexity of an enterprise platform.

Pro: A developer-friendly dashboard and strong upstream IP sourcing.

Con: Its 80M+ residential pool is relatively smaller compared with the four providers above it, while pricing can rise quickly at scale – from $7/GB at entry level to roughly $2,800/TB.

6. Rayobyte 

Rayobyte offers 40M+ IPs across 150+ countries, with ethical sourcing as a central part of its positioning. Its pay-as-you-go pricing is also competitive, starting at $3.50/GB and dropping to $0.70/GB on the 1000GB plan.

Pro: No subscription lock-in, with transparent pricing and accessible support.

Con: Its 1.86-second global response time was among the slowest in Proxyway's 2026 research, which could make it a poor fit for workloads where latency matters more than cost.

7. IPRoyal

IPRoyal strikes a balance between price and reliability for small- to medium-sized workloads. It recorded a 96.11% success rate and holds GDPR, CPRA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 compliance credentials.

Pro: Strong reliability at a reasonable price for smaller projects.

Con: There's no free trial, so you'll need to pay before you can test its performance against your specific targets. If you prefer to test before you commit, check some of the alternatives that offer a free trial.

8. ProxyEmpire

ProxyEmpire stands out for its non-expiring traffic policy: unused bandwidth rolls over indefinitely, even if you have gaps between subscriptions. Pricing starts at $0.75/GB on a custom plan, while Proxyway's benchmarks show that 96.63% of its IPs are on genuine residential connections globally.

Pro: Its flexible bandwidth rollover policy is unusual in the residential proxy market.

Con: API documentation is relatively sparse, and IP whitelisting isn't available as an authentication method.

9. Evomi

Evomi is the newest provider on this list, with more than 54M+ IPs. Its $0.49/GB starting price is the lowest of the 9 providers, while its 0.79-second response time remains competitive for such a low price point.

Pro: The cheapest entry price on the list.

Con: Targeting and filtering options are limited, and its 78.26% success rate on more challenging, targeted websites is noticeably lower than the leading providers.

Residential vs. datacenter proxies

Residential proxies route traffic through real ISP-assigned IP addresses, making requests appear to come from genuine home users. This makes them harder for anti-bot systems to detect and block.

Datacenter proxies, by contrast, use IP addresses hosted on cloud or dedicated servers rather than residential ISP networks. They're typically faster and cheaper, but their infrastructure is easier for anti-bot systems to identify. That can make them a good fit for monitoring smaller sites or basic price comparison, but a weaker choice for scraping targets with aggressive bot detection. See our datacenter proxies guide for a direct comparison, or read what actually separates proxy servers from data centers.

So, when is each of them ideal? If you need to maintain the same IP address while managing an eCommerce or social account over an extended period, a static residential (ISP) proxy can be a better fit because it keeps the same address rather than rotating it. Our static residential proxies page covers that use case in more detail. 

If you're working with a mobile-first platform, our best mobile proxies roundup is a better starting point. And for a broader comparison of ISP and residential proxies, see our ISP vs. residential proxies comparison.

Residential proxy use cases

Residential proxies are useful whenever you need to access web content from different locations while reducing the risk of blocks and maintaining realistic user sessions. The right setup depends on whether your workload needs frequent IP changes or a consistent identity. 

Here are some of the use cases:

• Web scraping and AI data collection. Large-scale scraping and AI training-data collection need broad, diverse IP pools to reduce blocks and keep jobs running. Our guide on scraping Amazon with residential proxies walks through a real-world setup.
• Price monitoring. Tracking competitor prices across regions works best with rotating IPs, so repeated requests don't continually come from the same address.
• Ad verification. Checking whether ads appear correctly in specific markets requires geo-targeted IPs and enough session time to load the full page. Our ad verification guide covers the setup.
• SERP tracking. Search results vary by location, so accurate rank tracking depends on IPs from the specific regions you're monitoring. See our SERP scraping resources for more.
• Multi-accounting and social media management. Managing multiple accounts from one setup often requires sticky sessions for each account, keeping the IP consistent throughout a session. Our multi-accounting guide covers the details.
• Sneaker and eCommerce automation. Fast checkout workflows can benefit from rotating residential proxies with per-request rotation, allowing each attempt to use a fresh IP.

As a rule of thumb, use per-request rotation for high-volume, stateless requests and sticky sessions for workflows that need to maintain the same user identity across multiple steps.

Residential proxy pricing

Most residential proxy providers charge by the GB of traffic rather than by IP. In this list, prices range from $0.49/GB to $6/GB, with the difference largely reflecting pool size and quality, IP sourcing practices, infrastructure, and the level of rotation and targeting control included.

Committed plans–where you purchase a fixed amount of traffic upfront–typically offer a lower cost per GB than pay-as-you-go pricing. The trade-off is less flexibility if your usage drops. Also look beyond the headline rate: geo-targeting fees, expiring balances, and minimum top-ups can quickly increase your effective cost. See our pricing plans FAQ for details.

Cheap residential proxies: What you trade for the price

Sub-$2/GB residential proxies can offer genuine value, but the savings often come with compromises in pool size, targeting precision, or support. More importantly, a lower success rate can erase the apparent savings. If failed requests require retries, you consume more bandwidth to get the same amount of useful data.

For example, a $0.49/GB provider with a 78% success rate on a difficult target could cost more per successful request than a $1.50/GB provider with a 99% success rate. Our cheap residential proxies page covers the lower-cost options, but always test a provider against your actual targets before committing.

Practical example: For a 500GB/month scraping workload, a $1.50/GB plan costs $750, a $3/GB plan costs $1,500, and a $0.49/GB plan costs $245 before accounting for retry overhead. On harder targets, an additional 15–30% in billed traffic from retries could narrow the gap considerably.

How to buy residential proxies: Step-by-step

Buying residential proxies is less about finding the cheapest provider and more about matching the service to your workload. Follow these steps to narrow your options and validate your choice before committing:

1. Define your use case and traffic needs. Scraping, ad verification, and account management can require very different rotation, targeting, and session settings. Estimate your monthly traffic in GB so you can compare plans realistically.
2. Shortlist providers using the five criteria above. Compare pool size and diversity, performance, rotation and session control, pricing, and trust. Prioritize the factors that matter most for your particular workload.
3. Test providers against your real targets. A free trial is only useful if you test it on the websites you actually plan to scrape, monitor, or access. Check success rates, response times, block rates, and bandwidth consumption.
4. Check IP quality and rotation behavior. Use a proxy checker to verify the IP's ASN and ownership type and confirm that it is genuinely residential rather than a datacenter address. Test both rotating and sticky sessions if your workload could use either.
5. Choose the pricing model that fits your usage. Predictable traffic generally favors committed plans with lower per-GB rates, while unpredictable or seasonal workloads may benefit from pay-as-you-go flexibility. Once you've chosen a provider, the quick start guide covers setup, while the sticky and rotating sessions FAQ explains the session settings you'll configure.

Bottom line

Independent benchmark data and use-case fit matter more than any single "best residential proxy" ranking. Decodo leads this list on independently measured performance and price-to-performance, while Oxylabs and SOAX may make more sense for particular workloads. The best way to choose is to test your shortlist against your real targets, measure success rates and costs, and then commit to the provider that performs best for your specific needs.