Best Residential Proxies for Web Scraping in 2026 (Tested & Ranked)

If you scrape anything worth scraping, the target site is trying to block you — and the single biggest factor in whether you win or lose is your proxies. I’ve run large crawls (tens of millions of pages) across most of the major providers, so this isn’t a spec-sheet roundup. It’s what actually held up on real, protected targets.

Quick note before the list: residential proxies are billed per GB, and that’s where people get burned. A “cheap” provider with a low success rate is expensive, because every retry costs bandwidth. Judge on success rate first, price per GB second.

The short answer

Provider	Best for	Rough price / GB	Success on hard targets
Bright Data	Hardest targets, scale	$$$	Excellent
Oxylabs	Enterprise, support	$$$	Excellent
Decodo (Smartproxy)	Best all-rounder	$$	Very good
IPRoyal	Budget + pay-as-you-go	$	Good
Webshare	Light jobs, static IPs	$	OK

1. Bright Data — the one that gets through anything

When a target is genuinely hostile (aggressive fingerprinting, heavy CAPTCHAs, per-IP rate limits), Bright Data is what I reach for. The pool is huge, geo-targeting is precise, and their success rate on the sites that block everyone else is the best I’ve measured. The trade-off is price and a steeper dashboard. If cost-per-GB matters more than raw success, start lower on this list.

Use it when: the target is protected and the data is valuable enough to justify the premium.

2. Oxylabs — enterprise-grade, great support

Oxylabs sits right next to Bright Data on quality. Where it pulls ahead is account support and their scraper APIs, which are genuinely good if you’d rather offload the anti-block work. Similar price tier. Pick it over Bright Data if you value hands-on support and clean docs.

3. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) — the best all-rounder

For most projects, this is where I’d start. Decodo gives you 90% of the big-two success rate at a noticeably friendlier price, with a dashboard you can actually understand on day one. If you’re not sure what you need, get this and only move up if a specific target beats it.

Use it when: you want the best balance of price, success rate, and sanity.

4. IPRoyal — budget-friendly, pay-as-you-go

IPRoyal is the one I recommend to people just getting started or running smaller jobs. The pay-as-you-go option (no big monthly commitment) is rare and useful, and the price per GB is low. Success on the hardest targets isn’t top-tier, but for the long tail of ordinary sites it’s plenty.

5. Webshare — fine for light, friendly targets

Webshare is cheap and has a generous free tier to test with. It’s best for lighter jobs and static residential IPs. On heavily protected targets it struggles — but not every job needs a tank.

How to actually choose

1. Start with the target, not the provider. Scraping a small e-commerce catalog? Decodo or IPRoyal is overkill-free. Scraping a site that blocks everything? Bright Data or Oxylabs.
2. Buy a small amount and test the real target before committing. Success rate on your site is the only benchmark that counts.
3. Watch bandwidth, not just IP count. Rotate sensibly, cache aggressively, and don’t load full pages when an API endpoint gives you the same data for a fraction of the GB.
4. Match the IP type to the job: datacenter (cheap, fast, easily blocked) → residential (the default for protected sites) → mobile (most expensive, most trusted). Don’t pay for mobile when residential works.

A word on doing it responsibly

Proxies let you scrape at scale, but that’s not a license to hammer a site. Rate-limit, respect robots.txt where it matters, and only collect public data. Good scraping is quiet scraping — it’s also what keeps your IPs alive longer.

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Picking a proxy is the easy part. Building a crawler that stays unblocked, lands clean data in your warehouse, and doesn’t fall over at 3am is the hard part — and it’s what we do. If you’d rather have it built and maintained for you, tell us about the project.