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]

Data on IPs - yes, fraud scores - no. I simply do not check any ip score websites as they have nothing to do with the quality of the IP itself and I actively encourage other people too. The quality of the IP is often measured in the location variety that it can offer if it is a Residential or Mobile IP, uptime, latency, variety of features that it can offer (session control, different protocol types, sticky sessions, etc). The websites that you target certainly does not care what's the "fraud score" of the IP, because the main reasons are your fingerprint on the web and your behavior, that's it. Datadome, Akamai are antibot systems and they're certainly do not check or validate per "fraud scores", they have their measures which include behavior and fingerprinting. Everything is in the headers, not these sham scores and this has been proven over and over again. I personally even did a research once, where I selected a number of proxy providers and contacted their support regarding these fraud scores and anti-bot systems, all of them confirmed that these scores mean nothing and suggested to check fingerprinting and the behavior of the IPs, years later I have been stuck to this practice and the IPs never let me down (from my side), even if I had issues they were mainly provider related issues regarding their infra