Every residential proxy provider claims a pool in the tens or hundreds of millions, a 99.9% success rate and the best price in the market. Those three claims are on almost every homepage in this industry, including ours. None of them helps you choose.
This is a guide to comparing proxy network alternatives on things you can actually check. It covers the four criteria that separate providers in practice, the two that look decisive and are not, and where each of the 22 networks we track lands. If you want the underlying numbers rather than the reasoning, every provider below links to its own comparison page.
Start by ignoring the advertised pool
The headline number, “150M+ residential IPs”, is the least useful figure a provider publishes. Nobody can verify it from the outside, and providers count it differently: some count every address seen in a year, some count addresses currently online, some count the peer network of a partner they resell.
What you can verify is how many distinct addresses actually answer for you during a fixed test. When we sent 250,000 requests through fourteen gateways in the United States on the same day, the counts landed between 14,223 and 150,512 distinct exits. Those figures do not represent the whole pool of any provider, but they are measured under identical conditions, so the ratios between them mean something.
The practical version of this criterion: ask a provider for a trial, send a few thousand requests, count unique exits. Any network that will not give you a trial has told you something.
The four criteria that actually separate providers
1. Network spread, not address count
Anti-bot systems rarely block a single IP. They score the network the IP belongs to, its ASN. A pool of 100,000 addresses spread across 1,600 operators behaves very differently from 100,000 addresses concentrated in 350, because the second one is a much smaller set of things to fingerprint.
This is where the gap between providers is widest, and it does not track address count. In our five-country test Webshare returned 9.7% more addresses than Shifter from 185 fewer distinct networks. DataImpulse and IPRoyal both returned pools in the low six figures, but IPRoyal drew from 1,350 networks against DataImpulse’s 1,526.
2. The price you will actually pay
Every provider has two prices: the one on the pricing page and the one you qualify for. The gap between them is the single most common surprise in this market.
| Provider | Advertised best rate | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Shifter | $0.75/GB | 200 GB, published |
| SOAX | $0.85/GB | around $3,000 a month |
| Oxylabs | $2.50/GB | around $2,500 a month |
| Evomi | $2.20/GB | 5 TB |
| Bright Data | $4.20/GB | volume commitment plus platform fee |
Compare at a volume you will genuinely buy, not at the floor. At 100 GB a month, a realistic figure for a working scraping team, most of this market sits between $2.25 and $5.50 per GB.
3. Whether the gateway holds up under your concurrency
A network that works fine at 10 concurrent requests can fall apart at 500. This is the failure mode nobody advertises, and it is the one most likely to break a production job.
Three of the fourteen gateways we tested could not complete a standard run at 1,000 concurrent connections. Proxy Cheap finished 10.3% of a US run. NodeMaven finished 67.7%, with a median response of 2,744 ms. ProxyEmpire finished 62.6%. Those are not bad IPs, they are gateways that will not accept the load.
Test this before you commit. Send your real concurrency at your real target during a trial, not ten requests from a laptop.
4. How long the provider has existed
This one feels soft and is not. Proxy networks close, get acquired, or get seized, and when they do your credit balance and your integration go with them. Of the 22 providers we track, several have already changed brand, and two have domains that no longer resolve.
A provider trading for a decade under one name is telling you something about how it is funded. Shifter has operated since 2012. Oxylabs since 2015. Bright Data, under two names, since 2014.
Two criteria that look decisive and are not
Success rate. Above a certain floor this stops separating anyone. In our runs, ten of the fourteen networks tested landed between 92% and 100%. The metric only tells you something when a provider falls off it entirely, which three did.
Country count. “195+ countries” appears on most pricing pages. What matters is whether the countries you need have enough addresses to sustain your job. A provider advertising 195 countries may have four hundred usable IPs in the one you care about. Ask for a per-country count during the trial, or measure it yourself.
Where each provider lands
These are the networks we track, grouped by the situation each one actually fits. Each links to a full side by side comparison.
Enterprise platforms. Bright Data, Oxylabs, Nimbleway. Deep pools, extensive tooling, and pricing that assumes a procurement process. Correct if you need managed unblocking and a contract; expensive if you just need addresses.
Mid-market general purpose. Decodo, SOAX, Webshare, Massive, Infatica, Proxy-Seller. This is where most buyers land, and where the price spread is widest for similar measured performance.
Budget and pay as you go. DataImpulse, IPRoyal, ProxyEmpire, PacketStream, Byteful. Cheap entry points. Check gateway stability before scaling.
Specialists and smaller networks. NodeMaven, Evomi, Rayobyte, Live Proxies, Proxy Cheap, NetNut, IPIDEA, LunaProxy.
The full list, with pool, price and coverage side by side, is on the proxy alternatives page.
A shortlist you can run in an afternoon
- Pick three providers whose published price at your real volume is within your budget. Ignore the floor rate.
- Get a trial from each. Send 2,000 requests to your actual target, at your actual concurrency, from the same machine.
- Count distinct exit IPs, distinct ASNs, and completion rate. Record the median response time.
- Repeat once in each country you need. Country pools vary far more than country counts suggest.
- Choose on the ratio of usable addresses to what you will pay at your volume.
That is the same procedure we used across fourteen networks, written up with every figure in the benchmark series, and it is the only comparison that reflects your workload rather than someone’s marketing page.
Where Shifter fits
We publish the whole rate ladder, from $2.00 per GB at the 5 GB entry plan down to $0.75 from 200 GB, with no sales call at any step. In the five countries we measured, our network drew from 2,441 distinct operators, the widest spread in the series, with median responses averaging 400 ms.
We are third on raw pool count behind Webshare and Decodo, which is on the Shifter review along with the countries where a competitor edged us. If pool depth at any price is your only criterion, that page will tell you where to look instead.
Otherwise, start a trial and run the five steps above.