What is the best proxy provider in 2026?

Decodo is the provider formerly known as Smartproxy. Independent US reviewers keep naming it the best value pick, and on Reddit it's one of the two names that come up most, alongside IPRoyal. The numbers explain it: a residential GB starts at $4 pay as you go (funded from a wallet, one GB at a time) and drops to $2 on the 1,000 GB plan.

The pool is advertised at 115M+ IPs in 195+ locations, and Decodo is a member of the EWDCI, the industry body that certifies ethical sourcing of residential IPs. Sticky sessions (you keep the same IP for several minutes) are set by port number, which makes wiring it into an antidetect browser simple.

The catch is on the price page: only residential pricing is spelled out there. If you need datacenter or mobile, compare on the dedicated pages before you decide. On the user side, one customer reports being charged twice after switching plans and getting the refund as credit, not cash, and others say sticky IPs drop before the session ends. Support, though, gets steady praise for being fast and friendly.

Tip: the 14-day refund only covers a first purchase, with no prior trial, and under 20% of the traffic used. If you're counting on that safety net, skip the free trial. It's one or the other. And if you do take the trial, cancel it in time: otherwise it rolls into the paid plan on its own.

Bright Data runs the largest catalog in the market: 400M+ residential IPs active each month across 195 countries, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies, and on top of that scraping APIs that handle blocks for you. Our full review scores it 4.2 out of 5, with 4.8 for features and depth.

Price is the trade-off. A residential GB costs $8 pay as you go, twice Decodo's rate, and only falls to $5 on a $1,999 monthly commitment. Datacenter is competitive though: $0.60 per GB or $14 a month for 10 shared IPs. Promotions (matched deposits, three months at a discount) come around often, but always budget at list price.

The other thing to know is KYC (identity verification). Residential access is limited to verified businesses after a human review, sometimes with an ID document. Users describe rejected verifications, or a support bot that stands between them and a human; once they reach a person, support is rated quick and sharp. ISP and datacenter proxies open without KYC.

Tip: if you track Google rankings, look at the SERP API ($1.50 per 1,000 requests) before buying residential traffic. It returns the results directly, so you never manage IPs or CAPTCHAs yourself.

Oxylabs plays in the same league as Bright Data: 175M+ residential IPs in 195 countries, all four proxy types and scraping APIs. It co-founded the EWDCI, and specialist US review sites often put it first overall.

Residential starts at $6 per GB on small volumes and falls to $2.50 past 1 TB. Plans run from $30 to $500 a month, then Enterprise starts at $2,500. Datacenter is among the cheapest per IP ($1 shared, $2 dedicated), and mobile costs $7.50 per GB.

The weak spot is flexibility. Its pricing page states no refunds at all, and the $5 credit is the only way to try it. Some advanced filters and sensitive targets (LinkedIn, ticketing) require KYC, and failing it means no service. Customers report an account banned because the cardholder name didn't match, and ISP IPs already listed on Spamhaus. Support itself answers fast.

Tip: for residential sticky sessions, append -sessid- plus an ID to your username. One ID per browser profile, and each account keeps its own IP.

Webshare is the easiest way into proxies: 10 datacenter proxies and 1 GB a month for free, no credit card. It's also the provider Spanish-language roundups mention most, for exactly that reason.

Paid plans stay cheap on datacenter: 100 proxies for $2.99 a month. ISP proxies (static residential) start at $6 a month for 20 IPs, enough to give every profile in a small account farm its own fixed IP. Rotating residential costs $3.50 per GB on the 1 GB plan.

The limit: its residential pool is smaller than the big players'. The page lists 6.65M IPs in the US and 50+ countries, with no global total. Users like how easy it is to get going, but find the residential GB pricey for what you get and the dashboard rough around the edges. For heavy residential scraping, Decodo does better at the same price.

Tip: refunds require canceling within 2 days, under 1 GB used on datacenter or ISP, and only 0.1 GB on residential. Run your experiments on the free plan, not a paid one.

SOAX has one very useful quirk: a mobile GB costs the same as a residential GB. Elsewhere mobile usually costs more ($7.50 at Oxylabs). If your targets block residential but let carrier IPs through, that's a real edge.

Pricing works on monthly plans, and the rate depends on the country tier you target (three tiers). On the most requested tier, the free Sandbox bills $5 per GB, Builder ($200 a month) brings it to $3, and Enterprise at $3,000 a month goes as low as $0.85, the cheapest high-volume rate in this ranking.

The downside: no trial, and payments are non-refundable except in special cases. Its Trustpilot score is 3.3 out of 5 on only 148 reviews. Customers describe IPs rotating after 5 to 10 seconds despite session settings, and a dispute over metered traffic. The page doesn't list pool size or datacenter and ISP prices either.

Tip: check which tier your target countries fall into before picking a plan. The same subscription gives a different per-GB rate depending on whether you target the US or a country in another tier.

IPRoyal sells something few rivals offer: residential traffic you buy never expires, and there's no monthly minimum. Buy 10 GB, use 2 this month, and the other 8 wait for you. For irregular usage, that often beats a subscription that's cheaper per GB but resets every month.

Pricing starts high, $7.35 for a single GB, falls to $5.51 at 10 GB, and only reaches $1.84 from 10 TB. Subscribing takes 5% off. The pool is advertised at 64M+ IPs in 195+ countries. On Reddit, IPRoyal is one of the most recommended providers, and its Discord support gets a lot of love.

Caution is still in order. Trustpilot suspended IPRoyal's rating for breaching its guidelines, after removing fake reviews, so that score can't be trusted. Among the remaining reviews, customers describe timeouts from the start, then a refund denied on the grounds that normal trial usage voids it. And there's no free trial.

Tip: buy 1 GB, check where a few IPs really come from (a carrier ASN, not a hosting company; see our tips), then jump straight to the 10 GB tier, where the price drops 25%.

Rayobyte is a US provider best known for datacenter proxies: $1 per semi-dedicated IP per month (5 IPs minimum), in the US and Canada. For scraping lightly protected sites, that's often the lowest cost per page, well ahead of residential.

It also sells premium residential at $3.50 per GB on small volumes (1 to 49 GB), static ISP IPs at $5 a month (5 IPs minimum) and a mobile plan at $250 a month for 83 GB. Rare perk: every product has a free trial with no card. Rayobyte is EWDCI certified.

The limits: its price page also shows ambiguous "Scale" rates we can't compare fairly, and it shows up less in user reviews than its rivals. Outside North America, its datacenter edge fades. The mobile plan works out to about $3 per GB, but only if you use all 83 GB within 30 days, when unused traffic expires.

Tip: on a scraping project, start on its datacenter IPs and move only part of your requests to residential, on the sites that return 403 errors or CAPTCHAs. To pick the tool that drives those requests, see the best web scraping solutions.

Thordata posts the lowest residential prices in this ranking at first purchase: $2 per GB, $1.80 from 10 GB and $0.73 at 1 TB. The catalog is broad (residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter, scraping APIs) and it's all pay as you go, with no contract.

Our full review scores it 2.9 out of 5, and the reason is trust, not features. Trustpilot suspended its rating after removing fake or incentivized reviews. Users report being billed after the free trial, mislocated IPs and patchy support, which scores 2.4 out of 5 in our review.

We still rank it, last: its prices are public and the catalog is real. But proof that it holds up at scale is thin, and the price gap with Decodo closes fast if part of the IPs don't work.

Tip: if you try it, remove your card from the account after the trial and cap your first purchase at 10 GB. Compare your success rate with a higher-ranked provider before going further.