Proxy Market Research 2024

Proxy Market Research is the most comprehensive public report on the proxy server industry, released annually since 2019. It covers the market trends, provides large-scale performance benchmarks, and compares leading proxy server providers.

You’ll find this report useful whether you’re a proxy vendor looking to improve your product, a customer shopping around for proxies, or simply someone interested to see where the industry stands and how it’s changed throughout the years.

This year’s report:

Includes 13 proxy providers, from familiar names like Bright Data and Oxylabs to newcomers like Dataimpulse and Nimbleway.
Investigates three proxy server types: residential, mobile, and rotating datacenter proxies.
Draws insights from a questionnaire sent to all participants, as well as our own know-how.
Provides performance data based on millions of connection requests, made even more accurate thanks to our improved infrastructure.

Changes and improvements

Residential and mobile proxies:
- Added Brazil to tested country pools.
- Replaced individual country pools of Germany and France with the European Union (combines France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands).
- In addition to Germany, added two new servers in the US and Singapore. This should provide more accurate response time metrics for relevant country pools.
Residential proxies:
- New benchmark – IP fraud score based on IPQualityScore data.

The majority of data were collected in February and March of 2024, with minor updates made until early May.

Participants

2024’s research includes 13 proxy service providers. Below is their list with applicable proxy types, while the adjacent tabs provide brief summaries of each participant.

We decided to categorize the companies based on their target market segment:

Entry-level providers work best for individual or small-scale projects;
Mid-market providers cater to a wide range of scraping, account management, and similar tasks;
Enterprise providers focus on an integrated experience that accommodates large-scale use by teams.

Note: Throughout this research, we’ll be listing the participants either alphabetically or, where possible, in order of their performance.

Provider	Segment	Residential	Mobile	Rotating Datacenter
Bright Data	Enterprise	✅	✅	✅
NetNut	Enterprise	✅	✅	✅
Nimbleway	Enterprise	✅	❌	❌
Oxylabs	Enterprise	✅	✅	✅
Infatica	Mid-market	✅	✅	❌
IPRoyal	Mid-market	✅	Dongle-based, not tested	❌
Nodemaven	Mid-market	✅	❌	❌
Rayobyte	Mid-market	✅	✅	✅
Smartproxy	Mid-market	✅	✅	✅
SOAX	Mid-market	✅	✅	✅
Webshare	Entry/mid-market	✅	❌	✅
Dataimpulse	Entry-level	✅	Not available during testing	Not available during testing
PacketStream	Entry-level	✅	❌	❌

Backed by the equity fund EMK Capital, Bright Data is one of leaders in the proxy server space. During the last few years, it has expanded the product portfolio and now positions as a data collection platform. Still, proxies remain Bright Data’s forte, with an emphasis on reliability and flexibility. The company’s lawyers are no less fierce than its engineers.

Country: Israel
Founded: 2014
Segment: Enterprise
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: proxy APIs, scraping browser, cloud web scraping IDE, datasets, e-commerce insights

A newcomer to the proxy server market, Dataimpulse embraced PacketStream’s playbook: it sources part of the IPs through an in-house proxyware app and sells them at bottom rates. Behind the provider stands Softoria, a Ukrainian software development company, which also maintains a popular SERP API and several other services.

Country: Estonia
Segment: Entry-level
Founded: 2022
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, mobile
Other services: –

A Singapore-based company with Eastern European roots, Infatica focuses on selling proxies to mid-range and enterprise clients. The provider sources IPs via an SDK and offers a competitive package at scale. Lately, it has been trying to attract investment for growth and seems to have found it in a venture capital fund that also backs SOAX.

Country: Singapore
Founded: 2019
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, mobile
Other services: web scraping APIs

IPRoyal made a name for itself with a range of affordable proxy services and non-expiring plans. The strategy proved successful, and the provider has grown significantly since 2021. Nowadays, it boasts thousands of clients, with a marketing budget that rivals top providers. IPRoyal maintains its own residential proxy pool through an app called Pawns.

Country: Lithuania
Founded: 2021
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: –

A company from Israel that belongs to Alarum. Originally the major provider of ISP proxies, the company now sells four rotating proxy networks and several data collection products. NetNut primarily targets enterprises with data collection needs and proxy resellers. It’s been doing well lately, as the public revenue figures show.

Country: Israel
Founded: 2018
Segment: Enterprise
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: proxy API, web scraping API, professional datasets

One more premium provider from Israel, Nimbleway recently emerged as a strong contender in the residential proxy space. The company puts much focus on R&D, embracing AI and other tools to help optimize its products. It sources IPs through multiple channels, the most notable being Salad, a GPU and bandwidth sharing platform.

Country: Israel (HQ in the US)
Founded: 2022
Segment: Enterprise
Proxy networks: residential
Other services: proxy API, web scraping APIs

Launched less than a year ago, Nodemaven puts a twist on residential proxies: it has introduced a multi-tiered IP quality filter and promises very stable sessions. In short, the service was made with multi-account managers in mind. The provider most likely resells; but that’s not necessarily a drawback as long as Nodemaven’s feature layer adds value.

Country: Estonia
Founded: 2023
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: residential
Other services: –

One of the market leaders, Oxylabs controls some of the largest proxy pools today. The provider targets enterprise customers, though lately it’s been making the platform more accessible through reduced pricing and improved self-service. We consider Oxylabs’ proxy infrastructure to be among the best in the market and have it given multiple awards for strong performance.

Country: Lithuania
Founded: 2015
Segment: Enterprise
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: proxy API, web scraping APIs, datasets

One of the first bandwidth-sharing marketplaces, PacketStream positions as a strong budget option and a reseller’s choice. However, its services remain functionally unchanged since 2019, and they’ve even gotten worse in real use. As a result, it seems like the provider is being kept on life support, propped up only by the incredibly low rates and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Country: United States
Founded: 2018
Segment: Entry-level
Proxy networks: residential
Other services: –

A self-proclaimed largest US datacenter proxy provider, Rayobyte now sells all proxy types. The company started as Blazing SEO and rebranded in 2022 to show the extended scope of its services. Rayobyte controls most of its datacenter infrastructure in-house. It tries to do the same with the residential network through an app called Cashraven; for now though, the majority of these IPs likely come from other sources.

Country: United States
Founded: 2015
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: web scraping API

For years now, Smartproxy has been a value choice for small to mid-range customers. It rose on the back of affordable rotating proxies and a low barrier to entry; nowadays, the provider has become an all-rounder that tries to retain these winning qualities. Smartproxy can be considered of the major industry players, following Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Country: International
Founded: 2018
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: proxy API, web scraping APIs, antidetect browser

A provider with Eastern-European roots and international presence, SOAX has entrenched itself as a major proxy vendor. The provider offers some of the best starting packages in terms of features. In 2023, it launched more proxy types, a line of scrapers, and adopted an aggressive pricing strategy, positioning to further compete with the leaders.

Country: UK
Founded: 2019
Segment: Mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
Other services: proxy API, web scraping APIs, AI scraper

Based in the US, Webshare mainly targets individuals and SMBs with affordable proxy servers. Its main strength lies in flexibility and highly developed self-service features, which few competitors can match. For a few years now, Webshare has been a very popular destination with over 50,000 customers around the globe. The company was acquired by Oxylabs in 2022, which likely supplies it with residential IPs.

Country: US
Founded: 2018
Segment: Entry/mid-market
Proxy networks: datacenter, residential, ISP
Other services: –

Methodology

This section details the methodology used for our performance benchmarks. All participants were introduced to it prior to testing.

We ran requests from three computers (testing servers), using a custom Python script and a global CDN as the target. The page weighs ~6KB, doesn’t block requests, and accesses a data center nearest to the proxy server.

For geolocation & ASN information, we consulted the latest IP2Location & MaxMind databases. We also used IP2Location’s Usage type data point to categorize the type of the proxy server.

Residential proxies

Proxy location	Days	Total requests	Testing server
Global	21	1.2 million	DE
EU (DE, ES, FR, IT, NL)	14	1.2 million	DE
US	14	560,000	US
UK	14	560,000	DE
India	14	560,000	SG
Brazil	14	560,000	US
Australia	7	140,000	SG

Mobile proxies

Proxy location	Days	Total requests	Testing server
Random	14	280,000	DE
EU (DE, ES, FR, IT, NL)	14	280,000	DE
US	14	280,000	US
UK	14	280,000	DE
India	14	280,000	SG
Brazil	14	280,000	US
Australia	7	140,000	SG

Rotating datacenter proxies

Proxy location	Days	Total requests	Testing server
US	7	70,000	US

We ran requests using a custom HTTPX script for Google, Amazon, and Homedepot, and a custom Puppeteer script with a stealth plug-in for the social media network.

To deem if a request was successful, we checked: 1) the response code (200), 2) the HTML size, and 3) the page title.

Residential & mobile proxies

Targets	Proxy location	Testing server	Requests
Amazon Google Social media network	US	US	~2,600 each

Rotating datacenter proxies

Targets	Proxy location	Testing server	Requests
Amazon Google Homedepot	US	US	~2,600 each

Download speed (rotating datacenter proxies)

Tool	Testing server	IPs checked
Hetzner’s 100 MB & 1 GB speed tests	US	At least 10

IP quality (residential proxies)

Tool	Checks (US)	Checks (Random pool)
IPQualityScore	~10,000	~20,000

Market Trends

This section provides an overview of the proxy server market. It’s based on our own market knowledge, as well as responses from a survey we sent to all participating providers. You’ll learn about the current state of the industry, popular proxy types and use cases, and possible directions for the future.

2023 Report: Despite Turbulence in Tech, Most Providers Had a Good Year

Last year saw over 260,000 layoffs in tech, which sent companies into cost optimization mode.
Despite that, our interviewees reported a good year, with multi-digit revenue growth and up to a 19x increase in proxy use.
The majority still have proxies as their main products and consider them central to business – for now.

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It was a weird year for tech: though major company stocks returned to all time highs, venture capital investments fell sharply, and over 260,000 employees received severance packages from nearly 1,200 businesses.

And while the general sentiment is that – at least in the US – a recession didn’t arrive, the anticipation generated a lot of uncertainty, which hasn’t dissipated in early 2024. Many tech companies have turned toward optimizing existing resources rather than expecting unlimited growth.

In our last year’s interviews, providers had a broadly positive outlook toward the future. You could feel an undertone of anxiety, but the majority believed their services to be an important part of business operations or even a cost optimization measure by themselves.

Today, our products power many companies' products or internal data, so fortunately we're one of the last resources to cut.

A survey response from 2023.

This proved to be correct. Most of the participants had a strong (mind you, self-reported) 2023:

Bright Data and Oxylabs experienced significant and healthy growth, respectively.
SOAX grew its usage by 64%, IPRoyal’s rose by 2.57 times, and Nimbleway’s by a staggering 19 times.
Infatica made 60% more revenue, while NodeMaven scaled to five figures within less than a year in business.
NetNut had an amazing year, too – public figures show that its revenue in 2023 exceeded 20 million, bringing in profits to the company.

At the same time, more respondents were reiterating what we heard from Bright Data last year, which is that companies are looking to cut operating costs and maximize out-of-the-box value. This can come in the shape of unblocking tools (many of which popped up last year) or straight up datasets.

Web data acquisition is becoming more challenging since some public data sources have implemented robust anti-scraping measures. This raises the importance of the quality of data collection infrastructure and constant innovation to build next-generation solutions.

A survey response.

For Bright Data, Nimbleway, and SOAX, proxy-based tools were already the main product drivers in 2023. The latter provider’s APIs found particular success in e-commerce and real estate verticals.

For others, proxy servers still dominate. At the lowest, their use is balanced with non-proxy services, as in the case of Oxylabs and SOAX. At the highest, the ratio can reach 95% to 5%, as reported by Rayobyte.

Of course, providers with tools invariably expected them to take a bigger role in 2024. However, proxies aren’t going anywhere: all respondents considered them a central piece of their business – at least for now.

What about 2024? The answers differed:

Market leaders Bright Data and Oxylabs emphasized tech-related aims like product reliability and innovation.
Nimbleway, which seemingly prizes R&D above all, planned to further perfect its AI-based functionality, while SOAX put high hopes on AI-powered scrapers and other integrated experiences for data collection.
Providers with a strong market traction like NetNut and IPRoyal expected to continue course.
Established contenders Rayobyte and Infatica had aggressive projections to double and triple their revenue.
The newcomer Dataimpulse planned to catch up on product variety, while Nodemaven boldly estimated to 4x its revenue and 5x the user base.

Competition: Subjectively (and Objectively) Increasing

Major providers are growing fast; but the market is still easy to get into, partly due to generous reselling policies.
Most interviewees believed that the competition has increased, particularly among new entrants.
Providers still manage to build their own residential proxy infrastructure in 2024 through VPNs and traffic-sharing apps.

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The proxy server market is starting to enter maturity. This is characterized by past acquisitions (for example, Oxylabs acquiring Webshare), together with the sheer scale the industry has reached. To give you some context, the number of people associated with Bright Data on LinkedIn has surpassed a thousand. This is huge!

Despite this, the market is still easy to get into. Aspiring vendors can launch a mobile proxy service in days using streamlined solutions like Proxidize, iproxy.online, or Proxy-Seller. Or, they can simply resell one of the major residential proxy services using white-labeling programs. With some marketing budget, it’s then possible to get initial traction through platforms like Blackhatworld and Discord communities.

When we asked providers if they felt the competition had increased, all of them said yes. At the same time, most pointed out new entrants rather than established premium players as the cause. Nodemaven thought that the market was now twice as fierce compared to the year before – considering that the provider started in 2023, this gives us a good indication of what emerging proxy providers face these days.

We can’t help but see the irony in the situation, as more than a half of the participants offer white-labeling programs for resellers. This creates a delicate balancing act, where you have to root for a reseller’s success but also be prepared to shut down the operation before it becomes successful enough to threaten you. Such resellers are always at the mercy of the supplier, unlikely to go far in the long run.

Unless, of course, they manage to build their own infrastructure in the meantime. IPRoyal showed a great example several years ago by kicking off its own residential proxy network. But that was then. Can it still be done in 2024?

Certainly. InfiniteProxies and Geonode have both launched proxyware bandwidth-sharing apps to rely less on external pools. And it was owned infrastructure that allowed Ping Proxies to survive the sneaker market crash while many others were forced out. Nowadays, the company runs a free VPN to source IPs and has big plans to compete with the incumbents. (You can read our interview with Ping Proxies here.)

The examples don’t end here. Dataimpulse and GoProxies build upon TraffMonetizer and Mysterium.network, two Honeygain alternatives. ASocks, a young and aggressive peer-to-peer proxy vendor, owns an SDK. Nimbleway, in turn, has found a successful resource sharing platform called Salad to provide quality peers. Finally, we can see projects like Grass on the horizon, whose AI and Web3 fueled hype train is a sight to behold.

All in all, the proxy server industry these days is anything but boring.

New Challengers: Chinese Proxy Providers Are Taking on the West

Since 2022, at least nine Chinese providers have entered the global market.
Some of them have large marketing budgets and low prices to pressure the competition.
Fighting takes place not only over customers but also trademarks.

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On top of growing competition in the lower market segments, we’re seeing something that stirs the pot even more: Chinese proxy providers are taking an increasing interest in the global market.

The process wasn’t gradual. Quite the opposite: we can count at least nine providers that appeared in the timespan of 18 months, beginning with 2022. The majority display similar characteristics: huge advertised proxy networks, an abundance of promotional pop-ups, and very cheap rates. Some specifically target 911 S5 holdouts with direct access to residential IPs through desktop software.

Some of the new Chinese proxy providers in the global market.

2022	2023
Lunaproxy, PyProxy, PIAProxy, IP2World, Lumiproxy, 922Proxy	OmegaProxy, NAProxy, ABCProxy

These Hong Kong-based vendors advertise in proxy-related communities, have started buying into affiliate websites, and compete for hundreds of paid Google keywords. Besides challenging competition directly, they also add to the secondary market – we’ve already seen some resellers set up shop on their proxy networks.

Have all the Chinese entrepreneurs had the same idea, all at once? It’s unlikely. In fact, some investigative work ties most of the newly sprung providers into two big conglomerates. So, it’s hardly a random torrent, but rather a coordinated effort by players with resources and ambition to claim their piece of the proxy pie.

Sometimes, the newcomers bring their own methods of competition, which aren’t exactly gentlemanly. Storm Proxies and Smartproxy both had to encounter brand squatters in the China web. It’s gotten to the point where a squatter is trying to challenge one of the providers in the west, with trademark claims and a similarly sounding domain. Here’s a lesson for you: if you run a proxy service, don’t forget to legally protect your assets.

Race to the Bottom: Residential and Mobile Proxy Price Cuts Continue in 2024

From the start of 2023 until now, there have been over 10 price cuts for residential and mobile proxies among major providers.
Mobile proxy networks are starting to lose their premium aura, fueled by the pricing approaches of newer entrants.
It’s reasonable to expect even more price adjustments, but the situation looks hardly sustainable.

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2023 was also characterized by significant price decreases, particularly for residential and mobile proxy networks. We dubbed this process the proxy provider price war (which may be a tad insensitive given the geopolitical context, but it seemed apt at the time).

Between May 2023 and March 2024, at least seven major proxy providers took price cuts ranging from 10% to as much as 80%.

Below is a timeline depicting the changes. Some are displayed in ranges, as the impact was usually highest at entry levels and tapered off with scale.

The timeline of residential and mobile proxy price cuts (2023-2024).

	Residential	Mobile
May	Smartproxy (10-35%)
June	Webshare (10-55%)
July		Bright Data (40%) Oxylabs (30%)
August	SOAX (25-45%)	Smartproxy (6-22%) Infatica (40-50%) SOAX (up to 80%)
September	Bright Data (30%)
October	Oxylabs (22-33%)
November	GeoSurf (22-35%)
December		Smartproxy (5-53%)
March	Smartproxy (12-25%) Bright Data (20%) Oxylabs (6.25-20%) Rayobyte (13-50%)
April	Infatica (17-43%)	Bright Data (65%)
May		Oxylabs (53-59%)

Notice that mobile proxy networks were also affected. This is the most obvious with SOAX, to the point where a reader may wonder if we made an error. No mistakes were made. In addition to reducing residential prices, SOAX equalized the rates of all its rotating proxy networks (at the time), resulting in that outrageous figure.

Are peer-to-peer mobile proxies losing their sheen? If SOAX’s example was the only one, we’d probably write it off as an eccentricity. However, we’ve been seeing more providers take the same approach. And these aren’t just small companies like AnyIP or ASocks – in April, Bright Data joined the fray by equalizing the rates of its mobile and residential proxy networks.

Besides straight off making things cheaper, providers have been introducing other changes to attract customers. Smartproxy now offers free trials for multiple products, and Bright Data has launched a Micro package that’s not quite a trial but offers the cheapest way to sample its proxy networks.

This raises two questions: are the current prices sustainable, and can we expect even more decreases? We believe the answers are no and yes. Providers are digging into their war chests, hoping that the competition will fold. According to SOAX, competing solely on price may lead to shortcuts on quality and ethics. The winners will either have the deepest pockets or break through in other ways, such as innovation.

Proxy Types: Residential IPs Dominate, Datacenter Proxy Vendors Ring Warning Bells

All but one interviewee chose residential proxies as their most popular IP type.
The one that didn’t, Rayobyte, believes that datacenter proxy servers don’t have much time left.
ISP and mobile proxies still occupy niche use cases, as major providers fail to make the best use of them.

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Last year, when we asked survey participants which proxy type was their most popular option, the message couldn’t be clearer: residential proxies. Only two providers – Rayobyte and Webshare – indicated otherwise, and those were the companies that originally built their businesses around datacenter proxy servers.

There are no surprises this year – residential IPs continue to dominate. All but Rayobyte chose them as the most popular proxy type (Webshare failed to fill in the questionnaire). Nimbleway considers residential proxies as the most effective tool today, and according to Bright Data, they’re the preferred choice among serious data scrapers.

Why? Tightening bot protection, mostly. In Zyte’s Extract Summit conference, Rayobyte showed how datacenter proxies have been losing major use cases one by one: Google first, then Instagram, and now Amazon is starting to hide ads from server-based IPs.

The provider believes that once Amazon fully implements the anti-datacenter technology it already has demonstrated, this will end datacenter proxies as a viable revenue stream.

The demand for other proxy types, namely ISP and mobile proxy servers, seemed to be growing as well. But our impression is that they’re still relegated to situational roles.

ISP proxies, even though they inherit the best qualities of datacenter IPs, haven’t become a full-fledged replacement yet. The potential is there, but it’s hard to source quality IPs (associated with large ISPs and having consistent information in IP databases).

In addition, major providers tend to package them as an awkward cousin to residential proxies: rotating, traffic-based, and even more expensive. Thus for now, ISP addresses often find their best use in padding residential proxy pools.

Mobile proxy servers have their strengths as well, such as scraping smartphone apps or emulating mobile traffic for ads. But they’re not really a natural upsell for residential proxies. We don’t necessarily agree this to be the case, but Rayobyte has even found residential IPs to work as well or better than its mobile proxy network – and for less.

One truly major use case, account management, is well served by dedicated mobile devices, which few major providers offer aside from IPRoyal.

AI: It’s Definitely Coming, But Not Always in Ways We Expect

AI-related use cases have already made an impact for half of the respondents, notably companies from Israel.
AI startups expect high-quality data, which sometimes requires proxy-based products and pre-scraped datasets.
Proxy providers are experimenting with AI-based scrapers, product enhancements, and external systems like chatbots.

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These days, it would be a blasphemy not to mention AI when talking about… well, mostly anything. Large language models and AI training are especially relevant to our niche because they require so much data. And while data licensing is emerging as a lucrative model for platforms like Reddit, most of the material still comes from good old web scraping.

It’s no wonder, then, that proxy and web data providers are jumping toward the opportunity to service this potentially huge market. Some, like Apify, were amazingly fast to populate their website with AI-related content, others slower. Still, nearly every major provider today has something to woo companies looking to feed their machine learning models.

Have their efforts paid off already? We had an opportunity to ask providers directly. The ratio turned out pretty balanced.

In general, it was Israeli providers that experienced the biggest impact. Bright Data and Nimbleway reported it as significant, and both disclosed working with world’s leading AI companies. NetNut mentioned that AI-related use cases have started to become common, giving an AI-based fintech company and the retail AI market as examples.

For Nimbleway, AI has actually become the dominant sector: it grew by 430% and accounted for over 50% of the provider’s customer user base. We find this level of specialization particularly impressive, considering that some survey participants haven’t gotten on the AI train yet.

In any case, the overarching sentiment was that AI-related use cases were expected to grow. Multiple providers mentioned high-quality data and proxy-based tools like APIs as keys to unlock adoption. This makes sense, as web scraping is starting to become increasingly demanding, and newer AI ventures may not have the willingness or expertise to build their stacks from scratch.

We also wanted to know whether providers have started integrating AI into their own products. Once again, half say yes, with Bright Data and Nimbleway reiterating that this was a key strategic focus for them. Overall, we distinguished three broad categories based on the answers: AI-first products, existing product optimizations, and external systems:

AI-first products. Because the tech is so new, we haven’t seen many production-ready tools yet. The best example is probably Kadoa, a scraper that revolves around LLMs. From our participants, NetNut announced a line of AI products on its roadmap, and SOAX is testing an AI no-code scraper in closed beta as we speak.
Existing product optimizations surface in various ways. Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Nimbleway all use machine learning models for response recognition and website unblocking in their proxy-based tools. Furthermore, AI parsers help Oxylabs to adaptively structure e-commerce pages and Nimbleway’s AI Browser to process HTML. Other uses include optimized proxy selection for the residential IP network (Nimbleway), as well as data enrichment and compliance monitoring (Bright Data).
External systems. Nodemaven, SOAX, and Rayobyte are all experimenting with chatbots to help with customer support.

As Zyte demonstrated last year in its web scraping conference, some forms of AI (in particular, large language models) are still not accurate or efficient enough for serious production use. But they’re bound to improve, fast. SOAX believes that we’re on the cusp of a breakthrough, and it’s only a matter of connecting the existing dots to achieve it. Let’s see if they’re right.

(More Traditional) Use Cases: Once Again, E-Commerce Dominates

In our questionnaire, e-commerce was the most frequently mentioned industry, followed by generic web scraping.
Otherwise, few major changes took place within a year.
Some participants pointed out finance and cybersecurity as potentially big use cases.

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Exciting as AI may be, it hasn’t eaten the world yet – tried and true use cases remain the real breadwinners remain. Last year, the star of the show was e-commerce – it alone brought up to 50% revenue for multiple providers. Have things changed since then?

According to our questionnaire, not really. E-commerce remained the most popular proxy server use case, without major shifts taking place in a year. The umbrella term of generic web scraping took the second place, followed by a poutpourri of answers that even included gaming. As a specialized provider, NodeMaven proved an exception – it pointed out social media management as its most significant use case.

The participants also shared some of their expectations. Like Bright Data last year, Oxylabs expected more investors to turn toward alternative data. In addition, both Oxylabs and SOAX pointed out cybersecurity (such as large-scale threat monitoring) as a vertical with a huge potential.

Legal: Social Media Platforms Face a Setback, Provider Disputes Claim Their First Victim

In 2023, both Meta and Twitter engaged in lawsuits against Bright Data over breach of contact.
Meta’s claim fell flat, and the social media giant folded in Febrary.
Bright Data also consumed its Israeli competitor GeoSurf, which became the first victim of infighting in the industry.

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Social media platforms have been hunting down web scrapers for several years now. The latter have won important battles, such as proving that public web data collection doesn’t incur criminal liability under America’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. However, Meta & Co.’s lawyers have found a new avenue for litigation – breach of contract.

The trend was already apparent early last year, when Meta and Bright Data sued one another in January. Facebook’s owner claimed that the Israeli company had broken its contractual terms by improperly scraping and enabling others to scrape the platform. Half a year later, X. Corp joined the fray by suing Bright Data on mostly the same grounds.

The scary part: both social media networks tried to stretch their usage terms to borderline ridiculous lengths. If earlier lawsuits (like Meta v. Voyager Labs) still involved alleged bot accounts, now it was enough to have business profiles on the platforms to prohibit all web scraping activities.

Fortunately, a U.S. district court had none of it and sided with Bright Data this January. According to Judge Edward Chen, Meta failed to provide proof of accounts that were used to scrape Facebook or Instagram while logged in. A month later, Meta dropped the case altogether, waiving its right to appeal. This was great news for the web scraping community, even if the ruling mostly applied in the scope of Meta’s contractual terms.

Bright Data’s lawyers had more reasons to celebrate. After years in court, the provider won against GeoSurf in their case on patent infringement and theft of trade secrets. From what we understand, GeoSurf already agreed to wind down in 2020, but the appeals and enforcement processes took three years to complete. In the end, Bright Data consumed the competitor’s business with a hefty discount and right of first refusal over its customers.

We’re not as happy about this development. Intellectual property is of course important, but there’s a fine line between protecting what’s yours and using patents as a weapon to hamper competition. For now, Texas remains Bright Data’s stronghold for patent-related purposes, and we’ll probably continue seeing other proxy providers tip-toe around it.

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are home devices (such as computers or phones) connected to landline consumer internet service providers like Comcast and Sky. They’re the prevalent proxy server type and the main business driver for most of our participants. Consequently, all offer access to a residential proxy network.

We’ll be looking at the advertised and actual pool sizes of these proxy networks, their performance in ideal conditions and with real targets, available features, and pricing strategies.

Evaluation Graphs

To give you a quick impression of how the participants compare, we’ve made evaluation graphs based on market segments. They use our weighted scoring algorithm – so, it’s not completely objective, but you can always view the raw data below.

(Hover on a provider’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

This year again Oxylabs remains one of the strongest enterprise choices. Bright Data too, though we feel like its attention has moved on to other things, and that our format doesn’t always capture the provider’s strengths.

NetNut is advancing in strides, and it’s poised to become a serious competitor for the first two. The first-timer, Nimbleway, has made a strong entrance, creating big expectations for its future growth.

(Hover on a provider’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

Smartproxy continues to prove a great value choice, even in the face of tough competition. Our freshman, NodeMaven, has shown that its approach has potential, especially for the provider’s focus use cases.

Infatica and IPRoyal have both improved. The latter is turning out to be a strong, albeit still imperfect choice, inching more upmarket every year. At the same time, third-party tools show that both providers’ pools have been suffering from their own success in terms of IP overuse.

SOAX and Rayobyte displayed mixed results that were sometimes worse than the year before. Still, they remain formidable options.

(Hover on a provider’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

Dataimpulse made a solid impression, especially at its price point. The provider has effectively replaced PacketStream, which has been in obvious decline for several years now. Webshare’s biggest virtue lies in its large and robust proxy pool, even if it’s not the cheapest entry choice.

Pool Size & Composition

The biggest advertised proxy pool has grown from 100M to 155M, with providers like SOAX and IPRoyal increasing their IP counts by thousands of percent.
In our benchmarks, NetNut had the most IPs in the Global pool, and Smartproxy in select country pools. IPRoyal and Infatica grew the most since 2023, whereas PacketStream has shrunk by 70% since 2022.
Most providers had proxy pools that were country accurate and residential. However, 40% of Rayobyte’s IPs in the UK and 60% in Australia came from different locations, and around a quarter of Dataimpulse’s proxies weren’t on residential connections.

	Advertised pool size	Change YoY	Coverage
SOAX	155 million	+3,000%	Global
Oxylabs	100 million		Global
NetNut	85 million	+325%	Global
Bright Data	72 million		Global
Smartproxy	55 million	+38%	Global
IPRoyal	32 million	+1,500%	~180 countries
Webshare	30 million		Global
Infatica	15 million	+50%	Global
PacketStream	7 million		~130 countries
Nodemaven	5 million		~140 countries
Dataimpulse	5 million		Global
Rayobyte	Not specified		~180 countries
Nimbleway	Not specified		Global

Total and residential unique IPs in the Global pool:

Change compared to previous years (cutoff at 1M connection requests):

Unique IPs in select country pools:

(Hover on a country’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

Percentage of residential IPs (ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB categories, IP2Location):

	Provider average	US	UK	EU	Brazil	India	Australia
NodeMaven	99.00%	99.59%	99.64%	99.53%	97.82%	97.94%	99.45%
Bright Data	98.78%	99.05%	99.81%	98.79%	97.58%	98.10%	99.36%
SOAX	98.53%	98.87%	99.22%	98.74%	97.63%	97.62%	99.12%
IPRoyal	98.17%	93.83%	99.16%	99.57%	99.67%	99.94%	96.83%
Webshare	97.24%	93.35%	97.65%	98.10%	97.61%	98.66%	98.04%
Oxylabs	97.22%	93.77%	97.71%	98.00%	97.76%	98.24%	97.85%
Smartproxy	97.19%	93.38%	97.64%	97.92%	97.75%	98.38%	98.06%
Rayobyte	95.87%	96.47%	94.96%	94.81%	96.97%	97.58%	94.43%
Netnut	95.39%	95.19%	96.51%	92.66%	96.60%	98.27%	93.12%
Nimbleway	92.89%	90.77%	89.31%	93.98%	96.85%	96.86%	89.56%
Infatica	91.17%	89.14%	89.65%	91.46%	97.14%	96.90%	82.72%
Packetstream	90.05%	72.39%	90.10%	94.35%	97.58%	97.04%	88.82%
DataImpulse	69.52%	78.66%	90.76%	74.33%	43.09%	98.54%	31.72%
Country average		91.88%	95.55%	94.79%	93.39%	98.01%	89.93%

Location accuracy (excluding EU, MaxMind data):

	Overall	Below 99.90%
Webshare	99.97%	–
Smartproxy	99.97%	–
SOAX	99.96%	–
Netnut	99.95%	AU (99.89%)
Oxylabs	99.94%	US (99.83%)
Bright Data	99.93%	AU (99.71%)
Nimbleway	99.86%	UK (99.73%), IN (99.83%), AU (99.87%)
Infatica	99.86%	UK (99.87%), AU (99.61%)
NodeMaven	99.85%	UK (99.88%), IN (99.61%), AU (99.61%)
IPRoyal	98.99%	UK (99.51%), BR (99.88%), AU (99.65%)
Packetstream	97.87%	US (96.21%), UK (96.67%), BR (99.48%), IN (99.23%), AU (97.76%)
DataImpulse	95.39%	US (98.08%), UK (96.60%), BR (83.00%)
Rayobyte	80.19%	US (99.43%), UK (61.53%), AU (41.61%)

IP Quality

The average fraud score in the Global pool was 45.57, with Smartproxy’s IPs being abused the least (32.72) and IPRoyal’s the most (72.55).
The fraud score was generally higher in the US (58.52). NodeMaven performed the best (27.73); however, enabling its quality filter had the opposite effect – the results cratered (69.41). Once again, IPRoyal’s score was the worst, together with PacketStream and Infatica – all three had an average fraud rating of over 80.

IPQualityScore, 20,000 checks per provider:

Provider	Fraud score (/100)	Proxy %	Frequent abuser
Smartproxy	32.72	35.33%	561
SOAX	33.96	36.64%	925
NodeMaven	34.98	37.55%	865
Nimbleway	36.81	40.54%	1296
Oxylabs	38.98	42.03%	674
DataImpulse	42.59	41.49%	1478
Netnut	44.37	45.79%	2548
Bright Data	44.52	47.52%	1412
Rayobyte	47.39	50.49%	1742
Webshare	47.94	50.51%	1580
Infatica	55.21	57.38%	2519
Packetstream	60.32	63.93%	1696
IPRoyal	72.55	75.70%	2309
Average	45.57	48.07%	1508

IPQualityScore, 10,000 checks per provider:

Provider	Fraud score (/100)	Proxy %	Frequent abuser
NodeMaven	27.32	28.43%	757
DataImpulse	33.05	33.49%	1385
SOAX	40.88	42.45%	1186
Smartproxy	42.97	44.88%	1020
Oxylabs	43.32	45.23%	1020
Netnut	45.28	46.44%	1730
Webshare	57.51	59.68%	1322
Nimbleway	58.11	64.05%	770
Rayobyte	65.00	67.10%	1792
NodeMaven (Max quality filter)	69.41	70.51%	2467
Bright Data	71.76	75.81%	1400
Packetstream	82.07	83.33%	1975
Infatica	89.09	90.52%	3625
IPRoyal	94.56	96.78%	3374
Average	58.60	60.62%	1702

Performance Benchmarks

Oxylabs had an amazing success rate overall, reaching 99.82% in the Global pool. The baseline has increased in general, with NetNut and IPRoyal making big yearly improvements (+8.66% and +4.63%, respectively). SOAX and PacketStream’s results, however, have declined, with the former experiencing a partial outage that lasted several days.
Once again, Oxylabs had the fastest response time in the Global pool (0.41 s), outpacing the slowest participant, Rayobyte (2.12 s) by over five times. NetNut (-0.93 s) and IPRoyal (-2.37 s) had the biggest yearly improvements, while SOAX (+1.06 s) has declined the most, especially in the Australian pool.
When accessing popular websites like Google and Amazon, Nimbleway and NodeMaven both performed very strongly (over 96% success rate). PacketStream, on the other hand, could barely open Google, and it failed completely with the social media network.

Average success rate, Global pool:

Change compared to previous years:

	2024	vs 2023	vs 2022	vs 2021
Oxylabs	99.82%	0.21%	0.25%	0.58%
Smartproxy	99.68%	0.25%	0.99%	0.42%
Rayobyte	99.01%	0.67%	0.04%
Bright Data	98.96%	-0.21%	-0.51%	-0.53%
SOAX	98.49%	-0.54%	-1.03%	-0.01%
IPRoyal	98.22%	8.66%
Netnut	98.15%	4.63%	5.30%	13.86%
Infatica	97.12%	1.17%
Packetstream	95.62%	-2.15%	-1.79%	0.48%
Average	98.34%	1.41%	0.46%	2.47%

Average success rate, country pools:

(This table is sortable.)

wdt_ID	Provider	Average	US	UK	EU	Brazil	India	AU
1	Bright Data	99.13	99.14	99.01	99.12	99.51	98.69	99.28
2	DataImpulse	95.71	97.76	98.03	98.20	83.78	98.91	97.56
3	Infatica	97.22	97.89	98.87	98.14	95.56	95.03	97.84
4	Smartproxy	99.20	99.67	99.71	99.64	98.13	98.30	99.72
5	Netnut	95.24	98.45	99.30	98.97	83.23	93.15	98.34
6	Nimbleway	98.80	97.18	99.13	99.31	99.60	99.09	98.48
7	NodeMaven	96.68	98.45	95.19	96.91	98.68	97.76	93.11
8	Oxylabs	99.53	99.68	99.75	99.70	99.17	99.06	99.79
9	Packetstream	94.36	97.28	96.35	94.87	92.27	92.55	92.85
10	Rayobyte	98.99	99.44	99.35	98.56	99.18	98.27	99.14
11	IPRoyal	99.39	99.83	99.59	98.59	99.78	98.93	99.60
12	SOAX	98.30	98.51	98.75	98.89	98.61	98.33	96.69
13	Webshare	99.04	99.72	99.77	99.59	98.09	97.36	99.72

Average response time, Global pool:

Change compared to previous years:

	2024	vs 2023	vs 2022	vs 2021
Oxylabs	0.41	-0.16	-0.45	-0.57
Smartproxy	0.54	-0.03	-0.75	-0.43
Infatica	0.99	-0.21
Bright Data	1.12	0.1	0.04	-0.06
Netnut	1.21	-0.93	-0.16	-0.19
IPRoyal	1.36	-2.37
Packetstream	1.56	0.41	-0.9	-0.34
SOAX	2.11	1.06	-0.23	-1.58
Rayobyte	2.12	-0.05	-0.01
Average	1.27	-0.24	-0.35	-0.53

Average response time, country pools:

(This table is sortable.)

wdt_ID	Provider	Average	Global	US	UK	EU	Brazil	India	AU
1	IPRoyal	1.09	1.36	1.03	0.53	0.63	1.59	1.67	1.06
2	Infatica	1.38	0.99	1.28	0.44	0.49	1.54	1.99	2.52
3	Smartproxy	0.75	0.54	0.49	0.39	0.43	1.28	1.23	0.65
5	Bright Data	1.18	1.12	1.00	0.75	0.80	1.04	1.76	1.73
6	DataImpulse	1.44	1.58	1.01	0.68	0.93	2.91	1.27	1.84
7	SOAX	3.12	2.11	3.09	2.79	1.36	2.07	3.30	6.12
8	Oxylabs	0.68	0.41	0.57	0.39	0.42	1.12	0.97	0.63
9	Webshare	1.67	1.67	1.10	1.06	1.16	1.90	2.72	2.07
10	Packetstream	1.82	1.56	1.02	1.69	1.72	1.55	2.40	2.56
11	Netnut	1.22	1.21	0.83	0.64	0.85	1.89	1.95	1.17
12	Rayobyte	2.53	2.25	1.67	2.15	2.40	2.70	3.29	2.97
13	Nimbleway	1.63	1.26	0.70	1.21	1.26	1.02	2.69	2.89
14	NodeMaven	3.67	1.72	3.36	3.90	1.44	2.19	3.78	7.34

Average success rate with major websites:

(Bright Data and Oxylabs block Google by default. Oxylabs enables it after a client review.)

Average response time with major websites:

Features

City-level targeting has been commoditized, with 10 out of 13 providers offering this feature. However, ASN selection is rarer: only seven participants support it. Dataimpulse has taken an unorthodox approach that allows excluding rather than focusing a particular ASN.
More providers have started implementing new filters, such as ZIP code and co-ordinate level targeting. Nimbleway & NodeMaven have taken things further: the former offers a use case-based AI optimization engine, while the latter has a three-level quality filter aimed at reputation-sensitive use cases.
Providers have started innovating with IP rotation as well: in particular, the ability to establish long proven sessions to ensure residential IP stability.
Generally, only the premium participants have HTTPS endpoints to meet corporate requirements. SOCKS5 is widely available (12/13), but in most cases it comes without the benefits of UDP or QUIC support.

	Country	State	City	ASN	Other filters
Bright Data	✅	✅	✅	✅	ZIP, coordinates, OS
Dataimpulse	✅	❌	❌	Exclude ASN
Infatica	✅	✅	✅	✅	Region
IPRoyal	✅	✅	✅	❌	Region, high quality pool
NetNut	✅	✅	✅	✅
Nimbleway	✅	✅	✅	❌	Use case
Nodemaven	✅	✅	✅	✅	IP quality filter
Oxylabs	✅	✅	✅	✅	ZIP, coordinates
PacketStream	✅	❌	❌	❌
Rayobyte	✅	✅	✅	✅
Smartproxy	✅	✅	✅	❌
SOAX	✅	✅	✅	✅
Webshare	✅	❌	❌	❌

	Every request	Sessions	Custom duration	Other
Bright Data	✅	✅	Custom rules with Proxy Manager	Long session peers
Dataimpulse	✅	✅	Up to 120 mins
Infatica	✅	✅	5-60 mins	Manual rotation
IPRoyal	✅	✅	Freely customizable	Manual rotation
NetNut	✅	✅	❌
Nimbleway	✅	✅	5-30 mins	Extended geo-sessions
Nodemaven	✅	✅	Freely customizable	Super sticky sessions
Oxylabs	✅	✅	1-30 mins
PacketStream	✅	✅	❌
Rayobyte	✅	✅	❌
Smartproxy	✅	✅	1, 10, 30 mins
SOAX	✅	✅	Custom duration
Webshare	✅	✅	Customizable session & idle timeout

	HTTP	HTTPS	SOCKS5	Authentication methods	Concurrency
Bright Data	✅	✅	✅ (requires extra software)	2	Unlimited
Dataimpulse	✅	❌	✅	2	Unlimited
Infatica	✅	❌	✅	2	Unlimited
IPRoyal	✅	❌	✅	2	Unlimited
NetNut	✅	✅	✅	2	Unlimited
Nimbleway	✅	❌	❌	2	Unlimited
Nodemaven	✅	❌	✅	Credentials	Unlimited
Oxylabs	✅	✅	✅	2	Unlimited
PacketStream	✅	✅	✅	Credentials	Unlimited
Rayobyte	✅	❌	✅?	2	Unlimited
Smartproxy	✅	✅	✅	2	Unlimited
SOAX	✅	❌	✅	2	Unlimited
Webshare	✅	❌	✅	2	Unlimited

Pricing

Subscription remains the dominant pricing model, but 9/13 participants also offer paying as you go. Out of them, four have PAYG as the sole pricing model, often with scaling rates for bulk purchases.
Residential proxies are more accesible than ever with the lowest entry price at $7 and the median at $8.4. Self-service has become universally available.
The rates have dropped nearly 40% at 5 GB and around 20% at 1 TB compared to 2023. PacketStream and Dataimpulse have the lowest prices with $1/GB, though PacketStream still overcounts traffic use by multiple times.

	Structure	Model	Upsells	Self-service	Starting price	Trial
Bright Data	Traffic	Subscription, PAYG	City, ASN, ZIP targeting, dedicated IPs, long session peers	✅	$8.4	7 days for companies
Dataimpulse	Traffic	Scaling PAYG	–	✅	$50	5 GB for $5
Infatica	Traffic	Subscription, PAYG	–	✅	$8	100 MB for $199
IPRoyal	Traffic	Scaling PAYG	–	✅	$7	–
NetNut	Traffic	Subscription	–	✅	$100	7 days for companies
Nimbleway	Platform credits	Subscription	–	✅	$600	7 days
Nodemaven	Traffic	Scaling PAYG	–	✅	$35	500 MB for €3.99
Oxylabs	Traffic	Subscription, PAYG	–	✅	$8	7 days for companies
PacketStream	Traffic	PAYG	–	✅	$50	–
Rayobyte	Traffic	Subscription, PAYG	–	✅	$7.5	50 MB
Smartproxy	Traffic	Subscription, PAYG	More sub-users	✅	$7	3 days
SOAX	Traffic	Subscription	More ports	✅	$99	100 MB for $199
Webshare	Traffic	Subscription	More threads	✅	$7	–

(This table is sortable.)

wdt_ID	Provider	5 GB	20 GB	50 GB	100 GB	250 GB	500 GB	1 TB
1	Bright Data	8.40	8.40	8.40	7.14	6.30	5.88
125	Dataimpulse			1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00
126	Infatica		6.86	6.86	6.00	5.00	5.00	2.92
127	IPRoyal	5.95	5.25	4.90	4.55	4.20	3.50	3.15
128	NetNut	20.00	15.00	12.00	8.00	6.50	5.00	4.00
129	Nimbleway	8.00	8.00	8.00	7.50	6.30	4.60	4.60
130	Nodemaven	7.00	6.50	5.00	4.50	4.00	3.50
131	Oxylabs	8.00	7.75	7.50	7.00	7.00	5.50	4.00
132	PacketStream			1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00
133	Rayobyte	7.50	6.60	5.00	4.50	4.00	3.50	3.20
134	Smartproxy	6.00	5.50	4.90	4.50	4.00	3.50	3.00
135	SOAX		6.60	6.17	5.68	4.00	3.20	3.00
136	Webshare	6.00	6.00	5.50	5.50	5.25	5.00	4.50
		Avg = 8.54	Avg = 7.50	Avg = 5.86	Avg = 5.14	Avg = 4.50	Avg = 3.86	Avg = 3.12

Price changes since 2023’s research:

Provider	5 GB	20 GB	50 GB	100 GB	250 GB	500 GB	1 TB
Bright Data	-44%	-44%	-44%	-44%	-44%	-44%	Custom
Infatica	–	-43%	-24%	-14.50%	-28.50%	-16.50%	-16.50%
Oxylabs	-47%	-48.50%	-37.50%	-13%	–	-8%	–
Rayobyte	-50%	-47%	-29%	-25%	-20%	-12.5%	+7%
Smartproxy	-52%	-45%	-39%	-35.50%	-33%	-30%	-25%
SOAX	–	-45%	-44%	-19%	-43%	-36%	-25%
Average decrease	-48%	-45%	-36%	-25%	-34%	-27%	-14.88%

Aggregated average price change compared to 2023’s research:

	All participants	Same participants
5 GB	-38.10%	-33%
100 GB	-24.60%	-18.30%
500 GB	-21.20%	-20%

Mobile Proxies

Mobile proxies are home devices (most often phones or USB dongles) connected to the 3G/4G/5G networks of consumer mobile carriers like Verizon. They’re considered the most effective proxy type in terms of anonymity. But, being expensive and hard to source, mobile IPs aren’t an everyday choice like residential proxy servers.

We’re interested in peer-to-peer mobile proxies rather than dedicated device farms. This section follows a similar structure to the residential part, only on a smaller scale and with fewer benchmarks.

Evaluation Graphs

Below are our evaluation graphs separated by market segment. There weren’t any true entry level peer-to-peer mobile proxy providers, so two categories will have to suffice.

(Hover on a provider’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

Oxylabs and NetNut both had very strong showings. We’re only concerned that NetNut’s promise of mobile IPs clashes with our data, and that we’re seeing significantly fewer carrier-bound IPs than the pool size would suggest. But maybe that’s an imperfection in our methodology?

Bright Data’s pool is immaculate as always. However, it’s not as big, and like last year, we can’t get it to perform with popular targets. Otherwise, the proxy network is definitely worth attention, especially after Bright Data’s latest price revision.

(Hover on a provider’s name to highlight it, click to filter out.)

Smartproxy and SOAX more or less cover all the bases, making both excellent choices for mobile proxies. Faced against competitors this tough, Rayobyte and Infatica fell short, without the price tag to weigh the scales back in their favor.