We've updated this data-based comparison of proxy providers (first published on January 6, 2023) to provide you with the best proxy providers in 2024.
Web scraping is the art of getting bots to emulate user behavior online in order to open websites and retrieve their data. Humans don’t request 50 pages per second from one website. So to extract lots of pages from one site without getting blocked, your requests need to look like they’re coming from different IP addresses and even from various ISPs and locations around the world. That’s why proxies are necessary for successful web scraping.
While proxies are not very expensive, costs can rise rapidly if you’re making tens of thousands of requests per day to the same website. Also, proxies have a short life expectancy, and they often stop working, so they need to be constantly monitored and replaced.
If you’re thinking of going with free proxies, bear in mind that you get what you pay for. Free proxy lists are usually public, so it’s easy for websites to block them right away. Using proxies that have already been burned, blocked, or banned isn’t going to do you much good. Paid is almost always better than free, as paid proxies are usually of higher quality and reputation. But which proxy providers are best for web scraping?
Armed with data from Proxyway, we’ve identified the 7 best web scraping proxy providers in 2024 for you to choose from.
🎖 Best mobile proxies
Winner: Oxylabs
Oxylabs comes out on top for mobile proxy performance. Oxylabs is one of the few mobile proxy networks that borrow IPs from real people rather than dedicated USB dongles.
Note: Oxylabs won the Proxy Service Awards 2023 for Best Proxy Performance. However, Proxyway didn't nominate them as best provider. Last year, we crowned Oxylabs the winner for dedicated datacenter proxies as well as mobile proxies. However, given Proxyway's most recent assessment, we had to hold back on that one.
Praise aside, we’re not nominating Oxylabs as the best provider this year. Despite introducing cheaper plans and easier access, the company continues to have usability issues with multiple products – namely, the datacenter and ISP proxies (which we hope will be addressed by the next year). However, as far as performance goes, we’re looking at a winner.
-- Proxyway
🎖 Best residential proxies
Joint winners: Oxylabs and Bright Data
For residential proxies, it's impossible to choose between Oxylabs and Bright Data. Oxylabs has the largest proxy pool in the world, and its residential proxies cover all locations and have precise targeting options. Bright Data provides the most unique IPs of all the providers, with balanced proxy pools, proper residential addresses, and excellent infrastructure (particularly in Europe).
Note: Bright Data won the Proxy Service Awards 2023 for Most Innovative Provider.
The whole company seems to ooze ideas, and it’s exciting to watch them expressed creatively rather than bullying competitors with patent lawsuits.
-- Proxyway
🎖 Cheapest residential proxy for large volumes
Winner: Rayobyte
With its Enterprise Residential Plan providing 1,000 GB for $3,000, Rayobyte wins for the cheapest residential proxy if you need a large amount of proxy traffic.
Note: Rayobyte won the Proxy Service Awards 2023 for Greatest Progress.
The company has been around since 2015, and for most of this time, it has focused on building and maintaining a datacenter proxy network. So, when we tested its freshly-baked residential and mobile proxies last year, it was a rough ride... Imagine our surprise when in this year’s tests, Rayobyte’s residential product had not one, not two, but more than 10 times the number of proxies!... The mobile proxies have improved even more.
-- Proxyway
🎖 Cheapest residential proxy for small volumes
Winner: Apify
With the lowest starting price ($62.50 for 5 GB) and no time limit on its free plan, Apify is the best provider if you need only a small amount of proxy traffic.
Achieve a higher level of anonymity using IP addresses from human users. Access a wider pool of proxies and reduce blocking by websites' anti-scraping measures... Pricing is based on data traffic. It is measured for each connection made and displayed on your proxy usage dashboard in Apify Console.
-- Apify Docs
🎖 Best developer features
Winner: Apify
Apify Proxy itself is neither better nor worse than the proxies of the other providers. What makes it stand out for developers are the other features of Apify. Unlike other providers, which offer a pure proxy solution, Apify is a web scraping platform. It gives developers easy access to serverless computation, data storages, distributed queues, and hundreds of web scraping APIs built by other developers.
Additionally, while Apify doesn’t run its own proxy infrastructure, Apify Proxy wraps multiple third-party providers, balancing between them to ensure higher reliability. If one provider fails, requests are routed to others, making it more dependable than relying on a single source.
It's also deeply integrated with Crawlee, an open-source web scraping library that generates human-like browser fingerprints and manages user sessions to make proxies more efficient and to protect them from burning out, saving developers money in the long run.
A super proxy for web scraping
Improve the performance of your scrapers by smartly rotating datacenter and residential IP addresses.
Available on all Apify plans
Note: This evaluation is based on our understanding of information available to us as of December 2023. Readers should conduct their own research for detailed comparisons. Product names, logos, and brands are used for identification only and remain the property of their respective owners. Their use does not imply affiliation or endorsement.
FAQs
What is a proxy?
A proxy is a program or server that acts as an intermediary between your device and the web pages you access on the internet. Proxies protect computers from malware and unwanted access from third parties. Proxies also let you bypass geo-location protections by using proxies in a specific country since companies enforce geo-location restrictions to block countries or regions to avoid traffic overload on their website.
What is a web scraping proxy?
In web scraping, proxies are used to disguise the identity of bots accessing a website. Clients forward requests to a proxy server, which delivers the requests to the destination server. The response is returned to the client via the proxy. Proxies obfuscate your online identity and allow you to rotate your IP address to reduce the likelihood of your web scraping activities getting detected and enable you to send more requests to extract the data you need.
What is a datacenter proxy?
Datacenter proxies are a fast and cheap way to mask your real IP address so you can access a website anonymously and bypass web scraping protections. Your request to a website will go through a server in a datacenter, and the target website will see the datacenter’s IP address instead of yours.
What is a residential proxy?
Residential proxies use IP addresses assigned by internet service providers to the homes and offices of real users. Unlike datacenter proxies, traffic from residential proxies is indistinguishable from that of legitimate users. This solution allows you to access a larger pool of servers than a datacenter proxy. This makes it a better option when you need a large number of different IP addresses.
Why use a proxy?
The five most common reasons to use a proxy are:
- To control and monitor internet access
- To enhance privacy
- To access blocked websites
- To improve speed and save bandwidth
- To improve security
How to use a proxy for web scraping?
Web scraping can work around IP address-based blocking by rotating the IP addresses from which they send the requests to target websites. This can be done by using a pool of proxy servers by assigning each request to another proxy server from the pool and thus making it look like a request coming from another user. The proxies can be selected either randomly or in a round-robin fashion. If too many requests are sent from a single proxy in too short a period of time, the proxy might get “burned”, which means all further requests from it are blocked. For successful large-scale scraping activities, you need a sufficient pool of proxies and to time the workload to maximize the scraping throughput while burning proxies.
