Best Residential Proxies for Web Scraping (2026)

Bright Data is the heavyweight champion of residential proxies for web scraping. With 150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries and city/ASN-level targeting, it consistently posts the highest success rates on the toughest targets — Cloudflare-protected sites, sneaker drops, social platforms, and aggressive e-commerce anti-bot systems. If a scrape fails everywhere else, Bright Data is usually the next thing teams try.

What sets it apart for scraping specifically is the depth of its tooling around the proxy network. The Web Unlocker product handles CAPTCHA solving and fingerprint rotation transparently, the Scraping Browser gives you a managed Puppeteer/Playwright endpoint with residential exit IPs baked in, and the ready-made datasets eliminate scraping for popular targets entirely. The dashboard surfaces success rates, bandwidth, and failure reasons per target, which is invaluable when tuning a pipeline.

The trade-off is price and complexity. Bright Data is the most expensive option here at low-to-mid volumes, and the platform has so many products it can take a week to figure out which one you actually need. Best for teams running scrapers in production at meaningful scale where reliability matters more than per-GB cost.

Oxylabs sits right next to Bright Data in the premium tier, with 100M+ residential IPs and a network engineered for enterprise data collection. In side-by-side scrape tests, Oxylabs and Bright Data trade blows — sometimes Oxylabs wins on Amazon and Google, sometimes Bright Data wins on social. The practical difference is that Oxylabs feels more focused: fewer products, cleaner positioning, and proxy quality is unmistakably the priority.

For web scraping specifically, the killer feature is the E-Commerce Scraper API, which returns structured JSON for product pages on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and dozens of others — no parsing required. The SERP Scraper API is similarly polished. Both ride on the residential network under the hood but absorb all the proxy-rotation and rendering complexity. If you're scraping retail catalogs or search results at scale, this alone often justifies the price difference vs. raw proxies elsewhere.

Where Oxylabs lags is the dashboard depth and self-serve onboarding — you'll likely talk to a sales rep, and minimums are higher than mid-market alternatives. Best for teams who already know they need premium IPs and want a slightly cleaner, more focused vendor relationship than Bright Data offers.

Decodo — known until recently as Smartproxy — is the price-to-performance king of the residential proxy market in 2026. With 115M+ IPs, sub-1-second response times, and pricing that starts well below Bright Data and Oxylabs, it's the provider most mid-market scraping teams should try first.

For web scraping, Decodo gets the fundamentals right: rotating and sticky sessions, country/state/city targeting, unlimited concurrent threads, and a generous free trial. Their success rates on standard targets (e-commerce, news, real estate, public APIs) are essentially indistinguishable from the premium tier — the gap only opens up on the very hardest anti-bot systems. The dashboard is genuinely friendlier than the enterprise vendors', and onboarding takes minutes rather than days.

Decodo also offers a Site Unblocker product (their answer to Bright Data's Web Unlocker) and pre-built scraping APIs for SERPs, e-commerce, and social, so you can graduate from raw proxies into managed endpoints inside the same account. The honest limitation: on a few of the absolute hardest targets, you may still need to fall back to Bright Data or Oxylabs. For 90% of scraping work, you won't.

IPRoyal has carved out a strong niche as the pay-as-you-go residential proxy of choice. While most premium vendors push you toward monthly commitments and bandwidth ladders, IPRoyal lets you load credit and burn it as needed — bandwidth never expires for years on the Royal Residential plan. For bursty or unpredictable scraping workloads, that pricing model alone is a meaningful unlock.

The network covers 195+ countries with rotating and sticky sessions (1-min to 24-hour stickiness), and the IP pool — sourced from the Pawns.app consent-based SDK — is solid for general scraping. IPRoyal is particularly popular for sneaker copping, ticketing, and ad verification, which tells you something about how it performs against difficult anti-bot systems. It's not in the same tier as Bright Data on the absolute hardest targets, but for the price it punches well above its weight.

The trade-off is that the dashboard and tooling feel basic compared to the premium vendors. There's no real Web Unlocker equivalent, scraping APIs are minimal, and you'll do more glue work yourself. Best for indie scrapers, smaller teams, and anyone whose usage doesn't justify a $500/month minimum somewhere else.

Thordata is one of the newer entrants worth taking seriously in 2026. The pitch is straightforward: 60M+ residential IPs across 200+ countries, aggressive pricing, and an ICANN/MEF-aligned compliance posture that addresses one of the biggest risks in this market — sketchy IP sourcing.

For web scraping, Thordata supports HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5, both rotating and sticky sessions, and country/state/city geo-targeting. The performance on standard scraping workloads (e-commerce listings, public data, real estate) is competitive with Decodo and IPRoyal. The pricing is the headline — entry-level per-GB rates are among the lowest in the market for genuinely residential (not ISP/datacenter relabeled) IPs.

The caveats are typical of a younger provider: smaller pool than the top three, less battle-tested on edge-case targets, and a smaller community of public benchmarks to lean on. Documentation is solid but not as deep as the premium vendors. Best as a secondary or backup provider in a multi-proxy stack, or as a primary for cost-sensitive teams scraping non-hardened targets.

ScraperAPI takes a different angle: instead of selling you raw residential IPs, it bundles residential and datacenter proxies, browser rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and automatic retries behind a single endpoint. You send a URL, you get back the rendered HTML — proxy rotation is invisible.

For scraping teams that don't want to manage a proxy layer at all, this is enormously productive. ScraperAPI auto-selects the right kind of IP per target, retries failures transparently, and renders JavaScript when needed. Pricing is per successful request rather than per GB, which makes budgeting predictable and aligns the incentive: ScraperAPI only gets paid when your scrape works.

The trade-off vs. raw residential proxies is control and unit economics. You can't cherry-pick exit IPs, you have less visibility into which countries/ASNs were used, and at very high volumes the per-request pricing becomes more expensive than rolling your own stack on raw residential proxies. Best for teams who want to ship a scraper this week, not engineer a proxy infrastructure.

ScrapingBee competes directly with ScraperAPI in the managed-scraping-API space, with a slightly different flavor: it leans heavily into the headless-browser-as-a-service angle and tends to win on JavaScript-heavy targets. Behind the scenes it uses a mix of residential and datacenter proxies plus real Chrome instances to render pages.

For web scraping use cases that rely on residential exits — geo-restricted content, e-commerce price monitoring, social-adjacent scraping — ScrapingBee's premium proxy parameter routes through residential IPs and handles rotation automatically. The Google-specific endpoints (search, maps, news, shopping) are particularly clean and a common reason teams pick ScrapingBee specifically.

Limitations mirror the ScraperAPI trade-off: less control than raw proxies, per-request economics, and some advanced anti-bot setups still require manual tweaking even with premium IPs enabled. The dashboard and SDKs are excellent. Best for teams who want a managed API and prioritize JavaScript-rendering quality over absolute residential-pool depth.

Zyte (the company formerly behind Scrapy) plays at the high end of the managed-scraping market. Zyte API combines its Smart Proxy Manager (residential, datacenter, and mobile pools), automatic ban handling, browser rendering, and AI-driven extraction into a single endpoint that's specifically tuned for serious data collection projects.

For residential web scraping, Zyte's strength is reliability and structured-data extraction at enterprise scale. The AI-powered automatic extraction can pull product, article, job, or vehicle data from arbitrary URLs without writing parsers — a meaningful productivity unlock if you're scraping thousands of different sites. Behind the API, Zyte juggles residential and datacenter IPs intelligently based on target difficulty, so you pay residential prices only when you need them.

The downsides are that Zyte is more expensive than self-serve API competitors, the platform is more complex (Scrapy Cloud, Zyte API, Smart Proxy Manager are separate-but-overlapping products), and onboarding is sales-led for serious volumes. Best for established data teams already comfortable with Scrapy or running large structured-extraction projects across many sites.