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.
The hidden cost of free proxies
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 8 best web scraping proxy providers in 2025 for you to choose from.
Best proxy providers
| Provider | Residential | Datacenter shared IPs | Datacenter dedicated | Mobile | ISP | SERP | Best for | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5GB | 50GB | 100GB | 500GB | 1,000GB | Start | Best/1000+ | Start | Best/1000+ | Start/GB | Best/GB | Start/IP | Best/IP | Start/1000 | Best/1000 | ||
| Apify | $40.00 | $375.00 | $750.00 | N/A | N/A | $1.00 | $0.60 | On request | On request | On request | On request | On request | On request | $2.50 | $1.70 | Developer platform & feature set |
| Bright Data | $42.00 | $420.00 | $840.00 | $3,150.00 | $5,880.00 | $1.40 | $0.90 | $2.20 | $1.30 | $8.40 | $5.88 | $1.80 | $1.30 | $1.50 | $1.05 | Premium residential & datacenter options |
| NetNut | N/A (14GB+) | $347.00 | $665.00 | $2,495.00 | $3,750.00 | Priced/GB | Priced/GB | Not available | Not available | $7.60 | $4.50 | Priced/GB | Priced/GB | $1.20 | $0.40 | Best SERP pricing |
| Oxylabs | $40.00 | $375.00 | $698.00 | $2,750.00 | $4,000.00 | $1.20 | $0.75 | $2.75 | $1.90 | $9.00 | $5.00 | $2.10 | $1.50 | N/A | N/A | Premium mobile performance & global reach |
| Rayobyte | $37.50 | $250.00 | $450.00 | $1,750.00 | $3,200.00 | $1.00 | $0.75 | $2.50 | $1.88 | $25.00 | $15.00 | $5.00 | $4.60 | N/A | N/A | Competitive residential & dedicated options |
| Smartproxy | $30.00 | $245.00 | $450.00 | $1,750.00 | $3,000.00 | $0.035 | $0.026 | $2.50 | $1.60 | $8.00 | $4.50 | $3.50 | $2.50 | $2.00 | $1.20 | Cheapest residential proxy for all volumes |
| SOAX | N/A (15GB+) | $310.00 | $570.00 | $2,000.00 | $4,000.00 | Priced/GB | Priced/GB | $2.50 | $1.20 | $6.60 | $4.00 | Priced/GB | Priced/GB | $2.10 | $1.60 | Best mobile value |
| Webshare | $35.00 | $275.00 | $550.00 | $2,500.00 | $4,500.00 | $0.0299 | $0.0179 | $1.33 | $0.975 | Not available | Not available | $0.30 | $0.225 | N/A | N/A | Lowest datacenter & ISP pricing |
Best proxies for large-scale operations
🏅 Winner: Oxylabs
Enterprise customers demand rigorous SLAs, certifications, and flawless proxy networks. Proxyway’s testing once again confirmed Oxylabs’ proxies rarely falter and often deliver speeds multiple times faster than the competition. Its vast proxy pools and continuous upgrades – like coordinate-level targeting, lower rates, and enhanced performance – keep it ahead, even as other vendors struggle to catch up.
Best platform for proxies
🏅 Winner: Bright Data
Bright Data consistently delivers high-quality proxy servers backed by expansive, feature-rich pools that drive its unified platform. Critics point to its complexity, yet its integrated design – combining account-based pricing, a single API for all proxies, and tools like Proxy Manager – resolves the common pain of juggling multiple systems. This comprehensive approach leaves competitors years behind.
Cheapest residential proxy for all volumes
🏅 Winner: Smartproxy
Smartproxy offers the lowest entry prices across all volume tiers – its 5GB plan is just $30.00, 50GB at $245.00, and even the 1,000GB tier comes in at $3,000.00. While Rayobyte ties with Smartproxy on 100GB and 500GB, it doesn’t beat it for overall value. That’s why Smartproxy won Proxyway’s Best Value Provider award in 2024.
Cheapest datacenter IPs for large volumes
🏅 Winner: Webshare
Webshare delivers the lowest pricing for both shared and dedicated datacenter proxies – with shared IPs starting at $0.0299 (and $0.0179 for large orders) and dedicated plans beginning at $1.33 (dropping to $0.975).
Cheapest mobile proxies
🏅 Winner: SOAX
SOAX tops the mobile proxy pricing with a starting rate of $6.60/GB and $4.00/GB at high usage – making it the most cost‑effective option for mobile traffic.
Cheapest SERP proxies
🏅 Winner: NetNut
NetNut stands out by offering the most competitive SERP proxy pricing at $1.20 per 1,000 SERPs (dropping to $0.40 for high usage).
Best developer features
🏅 Winner: Apify
Apify Proxy 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 storage, 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 February 2025. 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. They also 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.
