The Differences between Residential and ISP Proxies
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced proxy user, you’re probably wondering how residential and ISP proxies compare. After all, both proxy types are supposed to give you an IP address that looks like it belongs to a real person. So, what’s the difference? And why should you choose one over the other? Let’s answer these questions and more.
What Are Residential Proxies?
Residential proxies are proxy servers with IP addresses that Internet service providers (ISPs) have assigned to home users. The “servers” are actually their computers, smart devices, or mobile phones on Wi-Fi. Consequently, websites and services treat traffic from these IPs as coming from real potential paying customers. This makes them less likely to block you.
Residential proxies forward your internet traffic to the provider’s server. The server then routes the request through an available residential device. So, the connection path looks like this: your device -> proxy server -> user’s device -> website.
Strengths
- Many IPs to choose from: residential proxy providers control millions – tens and even hundreds of millions – of different IP addresses. That’s why you’ll hardly get the same IP address twice.
- Many locations: the size of residential proxy networks brings another great benefit – you can find IPs pretty much anywhere in the world.
- High diversity: many proxy providers offer virtual IPs originating from data centers, which come in related blocks called subnets. Websites and services can sometimes block entire subnets if the traffic looks suspicious. On the other hand, residential proxies rarely share the same subnet. Thus, you can forget accidentally blocking a bunch of IPs at once.
- Hard to block: websites can’t see whether you’re using a proxy server, but they can “guess” the user type assigned to the address. Connections from data centers are unlikely to come from potential customers. But residential traffic is the most desirable kind, so the systems are going to be a lot less block-happy.
Weaknesses
- Slow speed: these proxies are several times slower than datacenter or ISP addresses. Residential proxies come from a wide variety of consumer-grade devices and connections. Meanwhile, datacenter and ISP proxies are hosted on infrastructure fine-tuned for performance.
- Unstable connection: even if the provider offers sticky sessions, a user can disconnect at any moment, taking their IP down with them.
- Only shared IPs: there is no way to ensure when and how long the users will be online. Therefore, it is not possible to sell residential IPs as private/dedicated.
Ideal For
- Websites that have strict protection mechanisms. This includes social media platforms, sneaker stores, and heavily scraped sites like Wayfair.
- Location-sensitive tasks. Residential proxies are very helpful if you need to view localized content (think city-level) or work with multiple locations at once.
Example Use Cases
- Ad verification: advertisers check if their ads are placed in the right context and shown to the right audience. Residential proxies are the most popular choice for the task. Fraudsters can’t easily identify or evade them due to how spread out they are. In addition, resi proxies can cover many countries for localized campaigns.
- SEO monitoring: marketing agencies scrape Google and other search engines to track local keyword positions, research topics, and analyze competitors.
- Travel fare aggregation: proxy-powered aggregators can scrape various sources, allowing them to compare best hotels, flights, and other deals.As residential proxies are highly anonymous, they’re great for this task. They make it hard for websites to detect whether someone is collecting data from their site.
- E-commerce intelligence: residential proxies are hard to detect. This helps businesses extract insights from protected e-commerce platforms like Amazon. Without blocks, they can collect product trends, positioning, and pricing changes.
What Are ISP proxies?
ISP proxies (aka static residential proxies) try to combine the strengths of datacenter and residential proxies.
Like residential proxies, they’re marked as belonging to consumer internet service providers rather than web hosting data centers. Like datacenter proxies, they’re hosted on professional-grade servers. This means they have powerful connections and are always reliably online.
Strengths
- High speed and uptime: ISP proxies are fast, stable, and always available on-demand – just like datacenter proxies. That’s because they don’t need to rely on the unpredictable uptime of the users that provide residential “servers”. They don’t run on the wide variety of devices and connection types found in residential networks.
- Relatively hard to detect: ISP proxies are owned by internet service providers, who mark them as residential. This gives them a leg up over more honestly-labeled cloud hosting services.
- Unlimited bandwidth: some ISP proxy providers offer unlimited traffic plans. This option is very useful when carrying out data-intensive activities.
Weaknesses
- Low subnet diversity: ISP proxies can’t escape one drawback of datacenter IPs – they’re simply too organized. Having neat IP ranges sacrifices diversity. What’s more, if the service detects too many connections from the same subnet, you still risk getting subnet-banned.
- Small ISPs: it’s hard to get big commercial providers on board, so many of the IPs end up registered with small, regional companies. IP databases often identify them as datacenter IPs, which negates the main benefit of ISP proxies.
- Fewer locations: just like with datacenter proxies, it’s hard to get IPs in a wide range of countries.
Ideal For
- Protected websites that require a consistent identity: Facebook, Instagram, and Yeezy Supply are a few examples.
- Traffic-intensive tasks: you can buy ISP proxies by IP address. That means you won’t have to pay extra for bandwidth used.
Example Use Cases
- Multiple account management: marketers use ISP proxies to overcome account limits on social media. They can also access these accounts from different geographical locations without encountering issues. Merchants control several e-commerce accounts on platforms like Amazon. ISP proxies work great for this use case because they offer stable access to the same IP address.
- Large purchases of limited-edition items: many retailers have advanced bot protection mechanisms. ISP proxies are hard to detect and impose no traffic limits, so they’re popular for buying sneakers and other rare items.
ISP and Residential Proxies for Pokemon Center and Other Exclusives
Residential and ISP proxies used to be both popular choices for buying shoes – but sneakers aren’t the only limited-edition item on the market. Today, people use these types of proxies for Pokémon Center purchases, ticketing, and more. But which of the two is better? The answer is: it depends.
Residential proxies are great because they’re naturally diverse and you can generate as many IPs as you like. This works very well for raffles or running hundreds of tasks. The downside is slower speed and traffic limits.
ISP proxies, on the other hand, are faster and let you use unlimited traffic. It’s also possible to get IPs with a clean usage history, while residential proxies are less predictable. However, ISP proxies are easier to block in bulk and get you a fixed number of IPs.
So, you should consider your priorities: more tasks or unlimited traffic? If you’re not sure, it’s a good idea to try both. This way, you’ll see which type works better for you and diversify your risk at the same time. You can find some great providers in our list of the best sneaker proxies.
Comparing Residential and ISP Proxies
Here’s how residential and ISP proxies look next to each other.
| Residential | Static residential (ISP) | |
| Source | Real people’s devices | Servers in data centers |
| Speed | Moderate | High |
| Stability | Low-medium | High |
| Locations | Many | Few |
| Anonymity | Highest | High |
| Rotation | Automatic | Automatic or manual |
| Exclusivity | Shared | Shared or private |
| Price | Medium | Medium-high |
| Best for | Protected websites, use cases that need high IP diversity or precise location targeting | Protected websites that require a consistent identity or strict control over the IP address |
Frequently Asked Questions About ISP Proxies
Residential proxies are hosted on consumer devices owned by actual people. ISP proxies are hosted in data centers but are labeled as residential.
Residential proxies will more reliably unblock websites and services. Meanwhile, ISP proxies have better performance and can grant private IP addresses.
Residential proxies are generally cheaper to source (via traffic-sharing SDKs, for example). They also have negligible upkeep costs.
ISP proxies have the same costs as datacenter proxies, with the added surcharge of being a lot rarer to find. That’s because the provider not only needs to rent out a data center, but to also convince an ISP to mark them as belonging to their network.
Decodo, Oxylabs, and SOAX are among the best residential and/or ISP proxy providers on the market. We can say this as we have evaluated residential and ISP proxy providers as part of our Proxy Market Research 2026. Find out more about the features and performance of top-of-the-line providers in our best residential provider and best ISP proxy provider lists.
