Almost every “best residential proxy” list is an affiliate page. The ranking follows the commission, the numbers come from the vendor’s own marketing, and the reviewer never sent a request through anything.
We wanted a set of reviews that could not work that way, so we changed what the reviewer had access to. Instead of vendor documentation and a spreadsheet, we gave Claude a tool that could actually run the test: one server, one destination, one transport, one concurrency setting, and credentials for fifteen networks including our own. Every review on this site is written from the output of that tool.
What the tool does
It is a small HTTP load generator. Give it a gateway and a country and it sends a fixed number of requests to the same destination, one fresh connection per request, at 1,000 concurrent connections, and streams back four things for every response: the exit IP, the network that owns it, where it geolocated, and how long it took.
The rules are the same for every provider, because they are properties of the tool rather than decisions made per vendor:
- Same server for every run
- Same destination for every request
- Same transport, plain HTTP, no connection reuse
- Same concurrency, 1,000
- Same volumes: 250,000 requests in the US, 100,000 in the UK, 80,000 in France, 70,000 in Canada, 60,000 in Germany
That last point is where most comparison content quietly falls apart. It is easy to write “Provider A is faster” when Provider A was tested at 50 concurrent from a laptop in Berlin and Provider B at 500 from a datacenter in Virginia. Fixing the harness removes the option.
The scoring does not know which network is ours
The verdicts are written from the results, but the scores are not written at all. They are calculated.
Seven criteria, each normalised against the position of every tested network in the field: measured pool depth, network spread, price per GB, response time, country coverage, feature set and pricing transparency. Six of the seven come straight from the run. The rubric has no field for “is this our network”, which is why our own pool score is not a ten.
The full ranking it produces:
| Network | Score |
|---|---|
| Shifter | 9.7 |
| Webshare | 9.0 |
| Decodo | 8.7 |
| Oxylabs | 8.3 |
| Proxy-Seller | 7.8 |
| DataImpulse | 7.6 |
| Byteful | 7.5 |
| ProxyEmpire | 7.5 |
| Infatica | 6.5 |
| SOAX | 6.4 |
| IPRoyal | 6.3 |
| Massive | 4.9 |
| NodeMaven | 4.9 |
| Evomi | 4.9 |
| Proxy Cheap | 1.3 |
Yes, we came first. That is the obvious objection to a vendor publishing a ranking that includes itself, and it deserves a real answer rather than a disclaimer.
Why the top score is not the interesting part
Take our score apart and it is unremarkable in three of its four measured components.
On pool depth we scored 9.1, not 10, because Webshare and Decodo both returned more live addresses than we did. In the United States specifically, five networks came back with a deeper pool.
Where we do lead is narrower and more specific than “best proxies”. Across the five countries our pool drew from 2,441 distinct network operators, more than any other network measured. Median responses averaged 400 ms, the quickest in the series. And $0.75 per GB is the joint lowest published rate in the market, with the whole ladder public and no sales call at any tier.
That combination is what a rubric weighted toward spread, price and speed rewards. A rubric weighted purely toward raw address count would put Webshare first, and its review says so.
What fourteen years of building a network actually buys
The result that surprised us least is the network spread number, because it is the one thing in this market you cannot buy quickly.
Shifter has sold residential proxies since 2012. Pool depth can be rented: sign a supply deal and your address count jumps next quarter. Spread across 2,441 distinct operators is what accumulates when you add carriers one at a time for fourteen years, and it is the figure anti-bot systems key on, because they score the network an address belongs to rather than the address itself.
The price follows from the same history. When the network is yours, the floor is set by what it costs to run rather than by what a supplier charges you, which is why we can publish $0.75 per GB while networks measuring similarly ask $2.50 to $4.90.
The reviews that are not flattering
A ranking is only worth reading if the bottom of it is honest.
Proxy Cheap scored 1.3. Its gateway completed between 10.3% and 14.4% of a standard run, so its 20,450 measured addresses are a floor produced by a failing test rather than a measurement of its pool. Its review says exactly that, because publishing “20,450 IPs” without the caveat would be a claim the test did not make.
NodeMaven scored 4.9 on a 2,744 ms median and a 67.7% completion rate. Evomi scored 4.9 on the smallest complete pool in the series. Massive scored 4.9 despite running one of the cleanest and fastest tests of any network, because at $4.90 per GB the price criterion takes it apart.
That last one matters: Massive’s engineering is genuinely good and the score does not say otherwise, it says the rate is six and a half times ours for a pool less than half the size.
Read it, then check it
You should not take a vendor’s word for a ranking that puts the vendor first. You should not take an AI’s word for it either.
What you can do is check the method. It is published in full on every benchmark page, the destination is a public endpoint, and the harness is a few hundred lines of code. Get a trial from any three providers on the list, run the same fixed volume at the same concurrency from one machine, and count distinct exits and distinct ASNs.
If your numbers differ from ours, they are the ones that matter, because they came from your workload.
The full set of reviews is at /reviews, the head to head data behind them is at /benchmarks, and our own network is at /pricing if you want to start with a trial.