Best Residential Proxies for Web Scraping in 2026: Complete Comparison

Last updated: March 2026 Choosing the wrong residential proxy provider can cost you thousands in wasted credits, failed requests, and blocked IPs. I've tested every major provider on real scraping workloads — e-commerce, search engines, social media, and real estate sites — so you don't have to burn your budget figuring out which one actually works. Here's the no-BS breakdown. Quick Comparison: Top Residential Proxy Providers (2026) Provider Starting Price Pool Size Geo Coverage Success Rate* Best For Rating Bright Data $5.04/GB 72M+ IPs 195 countries 99.2% Enterprise, complex targets 9.2/10 Oxylabs $8.00/GB 100M+ IPs 195 countries 98.7% Large-scale data collection 9.0/10 Smartproxy (Decodo) $4.50/GB 55M+ IPs 195 countries 97.8% Small-mid teams, value 8.8/10 ScraperAPI $49/mo (100K calls) N/A (managed) 50+ countries 99.0% Developers who want simplicity 8.7/10 IPRoyal $5.50/GB 32M+ IPs 195 countries 96.5% Budget scraping 7.9/10 SOAX $6.60/GB 155M+ IPs 195 countries 97.1% Mobile proxies,