Best Residential Proxy Services 2026: Honest Comparison (Webshare vs Bright Data vs Oxylabs vs IPRoyal)

Best Residential Proxy Services 2026

Residential proxies are the unsexy but critical second layer of any production scraping stack. curl_cffi defeats TLS fingerprinting; residential IPs defeat IP-reputation gates. Without them, anti-bot vendors block you regardless of how good your client-side stealth is.

I've tested all four major vendors on real production scraping work. Here's the unflinching comparison — no affiliate links, no vendor relationships.

The honest verdict first

For 90% of solo developers and small teams, Webshare is the answer. The other three earn their cost only at scale or with specific feature requirements.

The four major vendors

Webshare (webshare.io)

Pricing: Pay-by-port model. $3/mo for 10 ports / 100 IPs. $30/mo for 100 ports / 5,000 IPs. Datacenter and residential available.

Pool size: 30M+ residential IPs claimed.

Strengths:

• Cheapest by 5-20× at small-mid volume
• Predictable monthly cost (no surprise bandwidth bills)
• Simple HTTP/SOCKS5 endpoints
• Free tier (10 IPs, 1GB/mo) — actually usable for testing
• Decent geo coverage (50+ countries)
• Good for round-robin rotation

Weaknesses:

• Customer support is async-email only on cheaper tiers
• Sticky-session control is basic
• Pool quality variable across countries
• No browser-based "Web Unblocker" product

My take: this is what I run in production. For >2 years across multiple client pipelines. ~$15/month covers everything I need.

Bright Data (brightdata.com)

Pricing: GB-based + per-request fees. Residential proxy: ~$3-15 per GB. Web Unblocker: ~$3-5 per 1k requests.

Pool size: 72M+ residential IPs claimed (largest).

Strengths:

• Largest, most geo-diverse pool (200+ countries, city-level targeting)
• Web Unblocker product handles JS rendering + anti-bot in a single API call
• Best support tier (real account managers at higher plans)
• Datasets product (pre-scraped Amazon, Walmart, LinkedIn, etc.)
• ToS-compliant pre-licensed datasets for hard targets

Weaknesses:

• Most expensive option by 5-15×
• Pricing is opaque — actual bills often exceed estimates
• Account-approval friction (sales team gates self-serve at higher tiers)
• ROI starts making sense above ~$2,000/mo of usage

My take: real-business product, real-business pricing. Justified at high volume or when you specifically need their datasets / hyper-targeted geo / managed Unblocker. Below ~$500/mo of usage, you're overpaying.

Oxylabs (oxylabs.io)

Pricing: Similar GB-based model to Bright Data. ~$8-15/GB residential. SERP scraper API priced per-request.

Pool size: 100M+ IPs claimed (across residential + datacenter + ISP).

Strengths:

• Comparable to Bright Data on quality + geo
• Slightly cheaper at the residential tier (vs Bright Data)
• Good documentation
• Strong support (Polish/Lithuanian team — actual technical engineers)
• "Real-time crawler" API as alternative to raw proxies

Weaknesses:

• Smaller datasets product than Bright Data
• Higher minimum commitments at the entry tiers
• Regional bias toward EU IPs (which can be a feature or a bug)

My take: solid number-two for enterprise-grade work. Pick Oxylabs over Bright Data if you have heavy EU traffic or want a slightly cheaper alternative with similar capability.

IPRoyal (iproyal.com)

Pricing: GB-based, ~$1.75-7/GB residential. No-expiration plans (you buy GB and they don't expire).

Pool size: 8M+ residential IPs.

Strengths:

• Best price-per-GB of the established vendors
• No-expiration GB plans (great for low-frequency use)
• Sticky-session control is the cleanest of the four
• Decent support
• Good for "I need 50GB total over 6 months" use cases

Weaknesses:

• Smaller pool than Bright Data / Oxylabs
• Geo coverage thinner outside US/UK/EU
• Less polished management dashboard
• Higher block rate on hard targets (Akamai, DataDome) than Bright Data

My take: my second-choice for residential. Worth considering if you specifically want a no-expiration pool or sticky sessions matter for your workflow.

The pricing math (real numbers)

For a typical "scrape 10,000 product pages per day" pipeline (~1.5 GB/day = 45 GB/month):

That's a 20× spread for the same outcome. The Webshare advantage is the per-port pricing model — at fixed volume, you pay flat regardless of bandwidth used.

The advantage flips at very high volume (~1M+ requests/day). Above that, Webshare's per-port model becomes a bottleneck (you need more ports), and the per-GB economics of the bigger players catch up.

Which one I actually use

For my own search-arbitrage business and most client work: Webshare. $15/mo covers it.

For the rare client that demands tight US-state-level geo targeting: Bright Data Residential. Painful invoice but the geo precision is real.

For the rare client that wants a "no-expiration" residential pool for sporadic batch jobs: IPRoyal. The 6-12-month pack approach matches sporadic-batch usage well.

Oxylabs: never had a use case where it specifically beat the other three. Good vendor, just not differentiated enough for my work.

What about datacenter proxies?

Datacenter IPs are 5-20× cheaper than residential but get blocked instantly on any major anti-bot site (Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX). Use them for:

• Sites with no anti-bot
• Sites whose anti-bot is purely TLS-fingerprint-based (where curl_cffi alone defeats it)
• Internal/B2B targets where you have explicit permission

For anti-bot-protected sites: residential is the only path that works at scale.

What about ISP proxies?

ISP proxies sit between datacenter and residential — they're real residential ISP IPs but provisioned in datacenter racks. Faster than residential, slower-to-detect than datacenter.

I haven't found ISP proxies decisive on most targets. Bright Data and Oxylabs both offer them; Webshare added them in 2025. Worth testing for your specific target if neither residential nor datacenter is fitting.

Common gotchas

Gotcha 1: "Bandwidth" overage at residential providers

Residential plans charge per GB transferred. A scraping job that fetches a 2MB page 1,000 times burns 2GB. At $13/GB on Bright Data, that's $26 for one batch. Watch your bandwidth.

Mitigation: request only the HTML (not images/CSS/JS) by setting Accept headers and not following resource sub-requests.

Gotcha 2: Sticky-session pricing

If you need IPs that persist for 10+ min (login flows, multi-step interactions), most vendors charge a premium for sticky sessions. IPRoyal's pricing is cleanest here.

Gotcha 3: Country-specific surcharges

Some vendors charge premium pricing for hard-to-source country pools (e.g., Israel, UAE, Singapore). Read the fine print before scoping a multi-country project.

Gotcha 4: "Successful request" vs "request" billing

Bright Data's Web Unblocker bills per successful request. Their Residential proxy bills per GB regardless of success. Make sure you understand which model each product uses before committing.

Setup snippet (Webshare with curl_cffi)

from curl_cffi import requests as cf

PROXY = "http://username-rotate:password@p.webshare.io:80"

r = cf.get("https://target.example.com/",
           impersonate="chrome131",
           proxies={"http": PROXY, "https": PROXY},
           timeout=30)

The username-rotate suffix tells Webshare to give you a different IP per request. Use username-sticky for session-stickiness.

What to read next

• Bypassing Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX — how proxies fit in the full anti-bot stack
• Why a $5/mo VPS Beats a $1,200/mo ScrapingBee Plan — proxies + VPS + DIY math
• Web Scraping Tools Comparison

If you're picking a proxy vendor for a specific brief and want a second opinion, send the use case to info@luba.media. I'll tell you which of the four fits without trying to upsell anything.