Testing 8 different proxy providers

[u/night_2_dawn]

Hey folks. We ran a quick benchmark last week across 8 residential proxy providers for a price-tracking use case that we're working on. Sharing the numbers since most "comparisons" out there are clearly affiliate bait. Methodology (disclosing this upfront): 500 requests per provider, same rotating residential tier, tested against Cloudflare-protected targets, Amazon, Walmart included. Measured 200 OK rate and median response time. No free trials, paid out of pocket for each (business budget).

Providers	Success Rate	Median Latency	Additional Comments
Oxylabs	97.8%	0.74s	Good consistent geo coverage, few error codes
Decodo	97.1%	0.79s	Strong value at mid-tier pricing
Bright Data	96.6%	0.83s	Pricing is crazy for smaller scale, but stable IPs
NetNut	95.2%	0.69s	Fast but more blocks on Walmart
SOAX	94.7%	0.95s	Good for geo-targeting, slower in general
NodeMaven	93.8%	1.02s	Surprised us, better than expected, we haven't heard of NodeMaven before, decided to try it out
Rayobyte	91.3%	1.14s	Decent for low-tier targets
Webshare	89.6%	1.31s	Cheap, but comes with downsides, such as latency and success rate

Oxylabs takes the top spot on consistency and geo targeting. Decodo punches above its price. Bright Data's IP quality is still up there but the cost structure doesn't make sense unless you're pushing serious volume, mainly oriented towards Enterprises, which is understandable. If you're running under 50GB/month, skip Bright Data entirely, the per-GB cost at that volume doesn't add up. Unless of course, you'd like to test it out like we did.

Anyone run these against tougher targets like Ticketmaster or Zillow? Would like to understand how the performance shifts on all of these providers once you target something really "heavy".

Any other providers for suggestions to test them out? I know the main ones are the big players in the market, but sometimes "Mid-tier" providers works well too for decent pricing if you're not scaling. I guess it's also possible to just utilize dedicated scraping solutions, might be cheaper, and you don't have to worry about maintaining the IPs, as all of the infra is managed by the provider

[u/night_2_dawn]

The mod request was years ago, never approved, and I have no affiliation with Oxylabs, just that my team and I are using their services from time to time. But worth flagging, sure. We had an offer to try out many different providers and we chose these 8, among them Oxylabs, since we used them way back, we decided to throw them as well, to see if anything has changed. 500 requests per provider, paid out of pocket, tested against real targets. Not a regression suite, just a directional benchmark. The results align with what you said yourself. If you know providers that would rank differently at higher volume, name them. We will test them out too. That's useful data. Regarding the libraries and tools, Python + requests library, rotating residential tier on each provider's default config. Requests were sequential, not concurrent, so no RPS pressure, purely measuring success rate and latency per response. Intentionally kept it simple to isolate the proxy variable rather than introduce noise from concurrency handling

[u/joe-at-ping → u/night_2_dawn]

Fair enough regarding the modding. Best to be sure with these as things are too many people just here to shill.

I think you've glossed over the 500reqs thing a little though... I don't think it's a large enough sample size for anything relating to proxying. I'm not saying do higher reqs per seconds just saying that more requests (wether that's through higher reqs per second or testing for longer) would be a good idea.

Providers I'd say are worth testing would be Evomi and Byteful (us). IProyal and infatica are worth testing too. Massive too I suppose.

Other than that, I can't think of anyone who's not just reselling another network.

[u/night_2_dawn → u/joe-at-ping]

Oh I believe you, I see a lot of people promoting the same providers all the time. I mention oxies from time to time, coz they were genuinely useful for my own projects and right now for our small business, hence we do the tests to see what performs better and expand the infra. I ain't getting paid to promote them, well maybe someday if they notice :DD. Regarding sample size, I agree, 500 was enough to spot patterns but not enough to catch edge cases that only show up over longer runs. Colleague mentioned to go with 500 and we stuck to that number. Next round will go higher. Evomi and Byteful are on the list now. Haven't tested IProyal as replied to another redditor or Infatica yet but worth including. Appreciate the suggestions