Best Proxy Services for Web Scraping in 2026: The Complete Comparison

Web scraping in 2026 means dealing with sophisticated anti-bot systems, geo-restrictions, and CAPTCHAs on nearly every major site. Your scraper is only as good as your proxy infrastructure. I've tested six of the most popular proxy services over the past three months across real scraping workloads — e-commerce, job boards, social media, and search engines. Here's what I found. Quick Comparison Table Provider Residential IPs Price/GB Free Trial Anti-Bot Bypass Best For Bright Data 72M+ $8.40/GB $5 credit Built-in Enterprise, large scale Oxylabs 100M+ $8/GB 7-day trial Built-in Geo-targeting, SERP Smartproxy 55M+ $7/GB 3-day trial Add-on Mid-range budgets ScraperAPI 40M+ ~$2.50/1K requests 5K free Built-in Managed scraping ScrapeOps Aggregated ~$3/1K requests 1K free Multi-provider Proxy rotation ThorData 60M+ $3/GB Trial available Basic Budget residential Residential vs Datacenter vs Mobile Proxies Datacenter proxies are cheap ($0.50-$2/GB) and fast, but most major sites detect and bloc