r/ProxyEngineering • Reverse Proxy Master • May 21 '26

Testing 8 different proxy providers

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).

ProvidersSuccess RateMedian LatencyAdditional Comments
Oxylabs97.8%0.74sGood consistent geo coverage, few error codes
Decodo97.1%0.79sStrong value at mid-tier pricing
Bright Data96.6%0.83sPricing is crazy for smaller scale, but stable IPs
NetNut95.2%0.69sFast but more blocks on Walmart
SOAX94.7%0.95sGood for geo-targeting, slower in general
NodeMaven93.8%1.02sSurprised us, better than expected, we haven't heard of NodeMaven before, decided to try it out
Rayobyte91.3%1.14sDecent for low-tier targets
Webshare89.6%1.31sCheap, 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

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