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YouTube proxies change your IP address and location, which makes it look like you’re connecting as a different person. You can use them to unblock YouTube or watch videos that are unavailable in your location. Scraping YouTube for AI training data? Using automation to generate views and subscribers for your channel? Proxies are vital for any of those tools to work. So here are some of the best YouTube proxies on the market.
1. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) – best overall YouTube proxies.
2. Oxylabs – YouTube proxies for business customers.
3. SOAX – great YouTube proxy alternative.
4. Byteful – powerful proxy market newcomer.
5. NodeMaven – residential and mobile proxies in one package.
There are many countries in the world who try to hide international content from their citizens. It’s most often no more than political censorship.
You need proxies if you wish to watch or upload content from a country where YouTube is restricted or limited. Proxies for YouTube can also help access content from your school or workplace.
YouTube automation covers many subjects. It can be as innocent as scheduling YouTube videos in advance or liking comments under your videos. It may also be used to follow (and unfollow) people or generate subscribers and views. There are many methods for automating YouTube and a lot of different YouTube bots.
The issue with YouTube botting is that nowadays it’s so hard to do. Google has the most advanced AI algorithms in the world, so you’d be playing a constant game of cat-and-mouse. Another important thing: it’s not exactly ethical, and sometimes even illegal. Just because you can buy YouTube subscribers and views, it doesn’t mean you should.
If you’re really determined to grow your YouTube channel, we strongly suggest choosing a good YouTube bot. Read up on browser fingerprinting (it’s important), go through forums like BlackHatWorld and Warrior Forum. Get yourself good proxies. Start slow.
There are many reasons to scrape YouTube. First off, AI training. AI has a boundless thirst for more data, and over 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube daily. That’s a lot of fodder for the hungry mind of the machine.
If not the videos themselves, you may instead be collecting comments, like numbers, and like-dislike ratios. You may gather video titles, subscriber counts, and creator hashtags (usually indicating video topics). We’re sure there’s other information in the public eye that might be useful. For example, if you are starting a new channel or trying to upgrade your old one, you can use these metrics to figure out what kind of content is the most popular these days. Choose something closest to your heart and just jump into it!
Another reason to scrape YouTube would be to collect Creative Commons (CC) videos. It’s both easy and legal, and you can then add them to your website without using the official YouTube player.
If you’re not sure which scraping software to use, Scrapebox has a YouTube Downloader. It lets you download video, audio, likes, comments, and other information.
There are several ways you can use YouTube proxies. If you simply want to unblock YouTube, you can set up a proxy server in your browser. You can do it either directly or using an extension, such as FoxyProxy or SwitchyOmega.
Some providers, like Decodo and Oxylabs on our list, offer their own browser extensions. Using them is very straightforward.
If you’re using proxies with YouTube automation software like UseViral, you can find the setup instructions on their official websites. Usually, it’s no harder than entering the proxy server’s IP address and port.
Every year, we run our Proxy Market Research. We take the top providers we have reviewed and run their proxies through a whole load of tests. Over more than three weeks of constant testing, we determine just how performant their networks are. At the same time, we make sure to take a look at the other aspects of their service – like customer support and subscription options – as well.
Seven of the providers on the list participated in PMR 2026. Here are the results of the infrastructure speed and success rate test, run over 21 days, with a total 3.6M (180k/day) requests made from a server in Germany. We also added pricing.
| Success rate | Response time | |
| Decodo | 99.92% | 0.53 s |
| Oxylabs | 99.93% | 0.60 s |
| SOAX | 99.78% | 0.89 s |
| Byteful | 99.69% | 0.41 s |
| IPRoyal | 96.11% | 0.86 s |
| Webshare | 99.28% | 1.66 s |
| Infatica | 97.57% | 1.64 s |
May 2026 data, making 3.6M requests over 21 days from a server in Germany.
| 5GB | 20GB | 50GB | 100GB | 250GB | 500GB | 1TB | |
| Decodo | $3.75 | $3.50 | $3 | $2.75 | $2.50 | $2.25 | $2 |
| Oxylabs | $6 | $5 | $5 | $4.50 | $4 | $3 | $2.50 |
| SOAX | $2 | $2 | $2 | $1.20 | $1.20 | $0.90 | $0.90 |
| Byteful | $3.25 | $3.25 | $3 | $2.75 | $2.50 | $2.25 | $1.95 |
| NodeMaven | $6 | $5.60 | $4.80 | $4.45 | $4 | $3.40 | – |
| IPRoyal | $5.95 | $5.25 | $4.90 | $4.55 | $4.20 | $3.50 | $3.15 |
| Proxy-Seller | $3 | $2.50 | $2.30 | $2.20 | $$2.10 | $1.70 | $1.45 |
| Webshare | $3.5 | $2.75 | $2.45 | $2.25 | $2 | $1.75 | $1.50 |
| Infatica | $4 | $4 | $3.84 | $3.60 | $2.90 | $2.70 | $2.60 |
We don’t recommend using a free YouTube proxy list. They’re almost always publicly available, which gives them a high chance of being abused and, very likely, flagged by YouTube. It’s actually rare to find free public proxies that are functional at all.
YouTube is getting smarter every day. It’s very efficient at recognizing bot activity. So if you want to use free proxies for scraping, you’d simply end up wasting your time.
As for unblocking content – free YouTube proxies could work for that, but we strongly recommend taking a look at our blog post about the dangers of free proxies.
Best overall YouTube proxies.
Try 100 MB for free.
Residential proxies
General info
Decodo is a perennial occupant of top spots in our tests, and it’s no different with YouTube proxies. What you want is residential proxies, and it has plenty – 115 million, spread over all the countries of the world.
If you want to get regionally-specific YouTube recommendations, targeting is available down to ZIP level (though country or city is probably enough). And you can stream and scrape like it’s the end of the world with thousands of connection requests at once. Moreover, Decodo supports automating such feats with an API and extensive documentation.
Decodo claimed our Best All-Rounder award for 2026 for its combination of features. And with a very decent entry price at $4, it’s easy to see why it got our best-value awards for many years. There’s Pay-As-You-Go, too.
For more information and performance tests, read the Decodo review.
YouTube proxies for business customers.
Residential proxies
General info
Oxylabs’ proxies have some of the best performance combined with one of the biggest IP pools. 175 million IPs across the globe are nothing to sneeze at.
Geotargeting can get as detailed as city, ZIP, or ASN. For additional filtering options, you can choose the proxy’s OS and/or IP protocol version (though these functions aren’t accessible by default). Protocol support was recently boosted with QUIC, too. Sticky sessions of up to 24 hours will help you keep the same AI and keep the verification hounds at bay.
However, Oxylabs’ pricing makes it less palatable for the regular user. The trial policy reflects this: companies can request a 3-day refund, and that’s it.
For more information and performance tests, read the Oxylabs review.
Great YouTube proxy alternative.
Use the code PROXYWAY35% to get 35% off.
Residential proxies
General info
SOAX’s proxy pool is overflowing with options for any refined YouTube user. 155 million IPs in 195+ countries is above the industry average, marking it as one of the big players.
The targeting options are granular, down to ASN and ISP. Filters include lookalike rotations that will try to find you a similar (say, the same ISP and location) proxy as the one that rotated out. Rotation settings go up to 60 min, or, if you’re very particular about an IP, you can set a strict session that will fail rather than look for a new one.
As for the downsides, SOAX puts limits on requests-per-second (1K) and proxies are priced per geographic tier (there’s three of them). On the other hand, it offers a fairly cheap trial and has recently abandoned its $90 entry fee for a more palatable $25 barrier.
For more information and performance tests, read the SOAX review.
Powerful proxy market newcomer.
Use the code PROXYWAY10 to get 10% off.
Residential proxies
General info
Byteful (previously Ping Proxies) offers proxies that put up a top five performance. The 35 million IP pool isn’t the largest, but it is still very respectable. Heck, it’s more than that – Byteful’s residential proxies beat others in infrastructure speed and average success rate with popular targets. And metrics where it isn’t taking the top spot, it’s merely giving the big dogs a run for their money.
When it comes to other features, Byteful offers top-tier geotargeting granularity and filtering; the most interesting option is the Smartpath routing engine. It analyzes your requests and determines if residential proxies are necessary. If they aren’t, it sends some of the traffic via datacenter proxies. This helps reduce your costs.
The $3.25 entry price is fairly reasonable, and the traffic never expires. However, customer support is essentially offline outside European business hours.
For more information and performance tests, read the Byteful review.
Residential and mobile proxies in one package.
Residential proxies
General info
NodeMaven won’t make you choose between residential and mobile proxies: you get both! The former (and more interesting for YouTube scraping) pool is 30 million strong. They’re spread across the globe and can be filtered down to ZIP level.
As a provider, NodeMaven is aimed at multiple-account managers, so it offers strong sub-user management options. And while it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, payments in crypto are accepted.
The entry-level price is low – $4.25 for 2 GB – and, if you recall, you pay for both residential and mobile access. If you’re unsure whether NodeMaven is for you, there’s a $3.50 trial that gives you 750 MB residential traffic.
For more information and performance tests, read the NodeMaven review.
Proxies with versatile filtering options.
Use coupon PROXYWAY30 to get a 30% discount.
Residential proxies
General info
IPRoyal may not be the king of proxies, but it is a choice worthy of at least a duke. 64 million proxies in 150 locations cover nearly the entire world. And the targeting options include the fairly rare coordinates option.
The filtering options include some interesting choices: only show high-end proxies, exclude proxies from certain ISPs, or even omit entire IP ranges. Rotation can be with every request or manual. More pertinently for YouTube account management, you can opt for sticky sessions of up to 24 hours.
The entry price of $7/GB stings a bit, but it’s non-expiring, and a PAYG option is also available. Another unfortunate fact is that the proxy performance trailed most other contestants in our benchmarks
For more information and performance tests, read the IPRoyal review.
Lowest-gigabyte entry point.
Use the coupon PROXYWAY to get 15% off any purchase and 39% off residential proxies.
Residential proxies
General info
Proxy-Seller’s residential network has recently grown to 47 million. Still, its reach is global – actually, it boasts 220+ locations. You can make full use of it with granular targeting options. The performance was fairly solid, back when we tested it for the review.
Rotation options range from every request to up to 60 minutes. Concurrency is unlimited. There were, however, some downsides when it came to the usability of its dashboard. For one thing, usage reports come with HTTP and SOCKS5 versions of every IP address.
For price-related funsies, Proxyseller offers the option to buy 0.5 GB. There’s also a paid 3-day trial.
For more information and performance tests, read the Proxy-Seller review.
Most customizable supplier of YouTube proxies.
Get 50% off your first purchase.
Residential proxies
General info
Webshare’s big draw is cheap residential IPs – at least until you find yourself needing extra features. You can always add more with the most customizable proxy supplier on the market. The largest single proxy pool is in the US (nearly seven million strong), but you will find more than a million IPs for the UK, Germany, and France each.
In our tests, Webshare’s performance always hovered somewhere around the midway mark. However, some of the upsell options include higher network priority as well as more threads (the default is 500).
Another big draw of Webshare is that the price at a very decent $3.5 (most large providers ask for $4+) and goes down fast. It stays well below market average even at the 1 TB mark.
For more information and performance tests, read the Webshare review.
YouTube proxies with a long (paid) trial .
Use the code proxyway2024 to get 20% off your first purchase.
Residential proxies
General info
Infatica’s pool of 35M residential proxies has global reach, and its filtering options go down to city, ZIP, ASN, and ISP. Unfortunately, its performance in our tests just wasn’t there, trailing most entrants.
What else? Sessions of up to 60 minutes, as well as the options to go to manual or strict rotation. IPv6 access would cost extra. More troublingly, the provider doesn’t support creating sub-users.
But when it comes to paying for the service, you can choose between subscription and PAYG. You can also pay for a trial as well, giving you seven days of use for $4.
For more information and performance tests, read the Infatica review.
A YouTube proxy is an intermediary device that stands between you and YouTube. When you connect through the proxy, YouTube will see its IP address, not yours. That’s how you can access YouTube as if you were located in any country you like. This lets you avoid firewalls and other restrictions that make using YouTube impossible. A good proxy provider will give you access to thousands of proxies that look like real users.
You can buy YouTube proxies from any of the providers on our list. Most of them offer free trials or money-back guarantees, so you can try their services risk-free.
You can unblock YouTube videos by using YouTube proxies on your operating system or browser. Alternatively, you can get a VPN.
We can’t tell you which bot is the best. But some of the more popular options are Jarvee and Socinator.