Best Residential Proxies in 2026: Oxylabs vs Bright Data vs Decodo vs IPRoyal

The best residential proxies in 2026 for legitimate business data collection are Oxylabs (best overall for enterprise targeting and compliance), Decodo (best value, from $11.25/mo plus VAT), Bright Data (largest claimed pool at 400M+ IPs), and IPRoyal (best budget pay-as-you-go with never-expiring traffic) — my ranking, built strictly from each provider's published pricing and documentation as of July 2026.

How we evaluated these providers (and how we make money)

Two disclosures up front.

First, ProxyFacts is monetized through affiliate partnerships with some of the providers on this page. Affiliate links are clearly marked, carry rel=sponsored, and have zero influence on the facts presented — every price and feature claim below names its source in prose.

Second, this comparison is built on documented evidence, not first-hand benchmarks: we have not yet completed our own performance testing program, so we compare what each provider publishes and commits to — pricing pages, trial and refund terms, targeting documentation, protocol support, and compliance policies, all fetched on July 17, 2026. Where a provider makes a performance or pool-size claim, we label it a vendor claim. For market context, we lean on Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026, an independent study that benchmarked 13 providers with data collected in March and April 2026.

Our evaluation weighs five dimensions:

1. Pricing — published per-GB rates at entry, mid, and committed volumes, plus billing quirks (VAT, promos, traffic expiry).
2. Trial and refund terms — how cheaply and safely you can validate the service against your actual targets.
3. Targeting granularity — country, state, city, ZIP, coordinate, and ASN targeting, since location precision drives data quality for price monitoring and SEO tracking.
4. Session and protocol flexibility — rotation control, sticky session length, HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 support.
5. Compliance posture — KYC depth, sourcing ethics, and restricted-target policies.

If you are new to the category, start with what a residential proxy actually is and how residential and datacenter proxies differ. For a step-by-step framework you can apply to any vendor, see how to choose a proxy provider. And for the broader craft of collecting web data responsibly, our web scraping guide is the companion pillar to this page.

A note on scope: we cover proxies for legitimate business use — price intelligence, SEO monitoring, ad verification, AI training data, and market research on publicly available data. We do not cover sneaker botting, ticket scalping, account farming, bypassing paywalls or logins, or collecting personal data, and we support the providers' policies that prohibit those uses.

Best residential proxies at a glance

Engineer’s take (Hinata): When I read a table like this, the cheapest-advertised-rate row is the last thing I look at — those floors assume committed volumes most teams never reach, so price your project at the tier you will actually land on. The number I would compute instead is effective cost per successful request: a $4/GB pool that fails one request in ten quietly bills you for every retry, so a slightly pricier pool that fails less can be the cheaper one. That is also why trial terms outweigh a dollar of per-GB difference — the only benchmark that counts is your own target list. And I would treat heavy KYC as a feature, not friction: a network that vets its customers keeps its IP ranges cleaner, which is a large part of what you are paying for.

Prices move: Proxyway's 2026 market research notes that Oxylabs and IPRoyal retired long-running discount codes while revising permanent plans down roughly 25%. Always confirm the live pricing page before committing; our proxy pricing comparison tracks the numbers in more depth.

Oxylabs — best overall for enterprise-grade targeting

Oxylabs is the premium end of this comparison, and its published feature set justifies the positioning. According to Oxylabs' residential proxy documentation (July 2026), it offers geo-targeting by continent, country, state, city, ZIP code, coordinates, and ASN — the widest targeting menu of the four providers — plus rotating and sticky sessions up to 24 hours over HTTP(S), HTTP3, and SOCKS5. Oxylabs claims a pool of 175M+ residential IPs, a 0.41 s average response time, and a 99.95% success rate; treat all three as vendor claims until independently verified.

Published subscription pricing runs from $30/mo for 5 GB ($6/GB) on Starter through $100/mo for 20 GB ($5/GB, flagged as most popular), $500/mo for 125 GB ($4/GB), and $2,500/mo for 1 TB ($2.50/GB), with top-ups allowed on every tier (up to 100 GB on Starter and Basic, up to 2 TB on Advanced and Corporate). A pay-as-you-go per-GB rate was not shown on the pricing page we fetched on July 17, 2026 — Oxylabs is subscription-first, which I read as a deliberate filter for committed accounts rather than an oversight. A free trial of the residential pool is available once per client, requested through a contact form or support@oxylabs.io; no explicit money-back guarantee is stated on the residential product page.

Compliance is where Oxylabs stands out. Per its published KYC and safety policy, every customer completes a KYC form at signup covering business details and use case; risk-based escalation can add ID verification, compliance calls, and risk questionnaires, and the compliance team monitors usage after onboarding. Oxylabs is also a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative.

Full breakdown in our Oxylabs review, and see how it stacks up head-to-head in Bright Data vs Oxylabs.

Bright Data — largest claimed pool, strictest vetting

Bright Data claims the biggest network in the industry: 400M+ monthly ethical residential IPs across 195 countries, per its residential proxies page (July 2026). Proxyway's 2026 market research cites Bright Data at roughly $300M annualized revenue growing 50% year over year on AI demand.

Published pricing: pay-as-you-go at $4.00/GB with no commitment (displayed as a 50%-off promotion from an $8/GB list price), and monthly subscriptions at $499/mo for 141 GB ($3.50/GB), $999/mo for 332 GB ($3.00/GB), and $1,999/mo for 798 GB ($2.50/GB), all shown with the same 50% promo applied. Geo targeting covers country, state, city, ZIP, and ASN at no extra cost, with sticky and rotating sessions over HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. Vendor performance claims are about 0.7 s response time and a 99.95% success rate.

The defining trait is compliance friction — by design. Bright Data advertises a free trial with no credit card required, but production access to the residential network is limited to verified companies that pass a human-reviewed KYC: you sign up as a registered company, verify a corporate email domain, and describe your use case, and the process may include an intro video call and government-issued ID of the point of contact, per its published KYC FAQ and network-access documentation. Freelancers and unregistered side projects will find this a wall; enterprises will find it familiar.

We go deeper in our Bright Data review.

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) — best value for small and mid-sized teams

Decodo is Smartproxy under a new name: the rebrand went official on April 22, 2025, with accounts, subscriptions, pricing, endpoints, and billing carried over unchanged, according to Decodo's own rebrand page. The value proposition also carried over: near-enterprise features at SMB prices.

Published pricing on Decodo's residential proxies page (all plus VAT, July 2026): pay-as-you-go at $4.00/GB, and subscriptions at $11.25/mo for 3 GB ($3.75/GB), $35/mo for 10 GB ($3.50/GB), $81.25/mo for 25 GB ($3.25/GB), $150/mo for 50 GB ($3.00/GB), and $275/mo for 100 GB ($2.75/GB), with enterprise plans from 250 GB to 1000 GB ranging from $2.50 down to $2.00/GB. That $11.25 entry point is the lowest committed-plan barrier in this comparison.

Features match providers charging more: targeting by continent, country, state, city, ZIP, and ASN at no additional cost; rotation per request or sticky sessions from minutes up to days; HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. Decodo claims 115M+ ethically sourced residential IPs in 195+ locations, an average response time under 0.5 s, a 99.92% success rate, and 99.99% uptime — vendor claims, as always. The trial story is the best here: a 3-day free trial with signup plus a 14-day money-back option on eligible subscriptions.

On compliance, Decodo runs automated fraud checks, KYC verification, and third-party screening for every customer at registration, escalating to third-party ID verification for suspicious activity or restricted target categories. It outright blocks high-risk targets — banking, government portals, streaming, app stores, ticketing — per its published security and compliance documentation, and maintains a public ethical residential sourcing policy.

More detail in our Decodo review.

IPRoyal — best budget pay-as-you-go with never-expiring traffic

IPRoyal targets a different buyer: the team with irregular, bursty workloads that hates watching prepaid gigabytes expire. Its signature term, per the IPRoyal residential proxies page (July 2026), is that purchased traffic never expires. Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $7.35/GB for 1 GB, dropping to $6.25/GB at 2 GB, $5.51/GB at 10 GB (flagged as most popular), and $5.15/GB at 50 GB; subscriptions run about 5% cheaper (from $7.00/GB down to $4.90/GB at 50 GB), and marketing cites bulk rates down to $1.75/GB at high volume — the lowest advertised floor here, though it is a marketing claim rather than a listed tier.

Features are solid but a step behind: targeting at country, state, and city level (no ZIP or ASN), rotation per request or sticky sessions with intervals up to 7 days — the longest sticky window in this comparison — unlimited concurrent sessions, and HTTP(S) plus SOCKS5. IPRoyal claims 64M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries, roughly 0.5 s response times, and a 99.4% success rate, the lowest claimed success rate of the four (still a vendor claim).

Two caveats from IPRoyal's own help documentation. There is no standard free trial for residential proxies — the official FAQ points buyers to the 1 GB pay-as-you-go minimum instead, with a dashboard trial appearing only if available to you and enterprise trials offered after company verification. And refunds apply only if the service fails due to an IPRoyal-side issue that support cannot resolve, reported within 24 hours of purchase — a window that tight means I would run my validation checks against my target list on day one, not later in the week. KYC is handled by third-party provider iDenfy and is mandatory only for static residential (ISP) proxies; it is optional otherwise, but unverified accounts stay partially restricted, with KYC eligibility starting after $10 of spend, per its published KYC policy.

Full analysis in our IPRoyal review.

Best residential proxies by use case

The right provider depends on what your workload actually demands. Here are our documented-facts picks for three common legitimate use cases.

Pricing reality check: promos, VAT, and expiring gigabytes

Headline per-GB rates hide three gotchas.

• Promotional framing. Bright Data's $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go rate is displayed as a 50%-off promotion from an $8/GB list price (July 2026). Promo-anchored pricing can change; budget against the list price.
• VAT. Decodo's advertised prices exclude VAT. Depending on your jurisdiction, the real invoice can run meaningfully higher than the sticker.
• Traffic expiry. Most subscription gigabytes expire monthly. IPRoyal's never-expiring pay-as-you-go traffic is the exception, and it changes the math for teams that scrape in bursts — a $7.35/GB rate you fully use can beat a $4/GB rate you waste half of.

The market context matters too. Per Proxyway's 2026 research, residential prices fell by as much as 75% across 2023 to 2025 before stabilizing, the median advertised pool reached 54M IPs, and grey-market entrants now advertise entry pricing under $0.50/GB. Those grey-market rates are a trap: sub-market pricing usually signals unconsented IP sourcing, the supply-chain risk a KYC-heavy provider protects you from. Free proxies are worse still — an academic 30-month study of 640,600+ free proxies (Free Proxies Unmasked, NDSS MADWeb 2024) found only 34.5% were ever active, identified 4,452 distinct vulnerabilities on proxy IPs (1,755 enabling remote code execution and 2,036 enabling privilege escalation), and caught 16,923 proxies manipulating content in transit. We unpack that study in free vs paid proxies.

Do you even need raw proxies? The scraping API question

Every provider in this comparison also sells a managed scraping product, and for many teams it is the better buy. Instead of paying per gigabyte and managing rotation, retries, and blocks yourself, you pay per successful result:

• Oxylabs Web Scraper API: from $0.25 per 1K results, pay only for successful results; free trial of up to 2K results with no credit card, per its product page (July 2026).
• Bright Data Web Unlocker: free tier of 5K requests per month with no credit card; pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1K requests; Scale plan at $499/mo with 383K requests included and $1.30 per 1K after, per its Web Unlocker pricing. A first-deposit matching bonus up to $500 also applies.
• Decodo Web Scraping API: free plan with 2,000 requests per month on standard proxies (no credit card, effectively $0.50 per 1K); Core at $19/mo for 38,000 requests at $0.50 per 1K on standard proxies; premium-proxy and JS-rendering requests at $1.50 per 1K across tiers, prices plus VAT, with a 14-day money-back on paid plans, per its scraping API page.
• IPRoyal Web Scraping API: labelled New with an early-access list; from $1.00 per 1K requests including rendering, proxy rotation, and CAPTCHA solving, per its product page.

The rule of thumb: raw residential proxies win when you have engineering capacity and heterogeneous targets; APIs win when a handful of hard targets consume most of your retry budget. My own bias, from years of operating production web systems: the expensive part is rarely the first build but everything after it, and a scraping stack — where rotation and retry logic must track targets that keep changing — looks like an acute case of that pattern, so I would default to the API sooner than most guides suggest. We break down the trade-off in scraping API vs proxy, rank the managed products in best scraping APIs, and cover the DIY skill set in how to scrape without getting blocked.

Compliance: the boring section that keeps you in business

Proxies are legitimate infrastructure for collecting public data at scale. Scraping publicly available data has repeatedly been found permissible in major jurisdictions, but the details — terms of service, personal data, copyright, computer-access laws — are jurisdiction-specific. Our explainer on whether web scraping is legal covers the case law; nothing on this page is legal advice.

What their documented compliance programs mean for a buyer:

1. Expect to be vetted. Every provider here screens customers — see the KYC row in the comparison table above. If a use case cannot survive a KYC form, it does not belong on these networks — or on this site.
2. Vetting protects your operation. Residential IPs are shared infrastructure. A provider that filters out abusive customers keeps its ranges off blocklists, which improves your success rates on legitimate work like ad verification and market research.
3. Sourcing ethics are documented, so read them. Decodo publishes an ethical residential sourcing policy, Bright Data brands its pool as ethically sourced, and Oxylabs belongs to the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative. These are vendor commitments rather than independent audits.

Bottom line: which residential proxy should you buy in 2026?

• Best overall: Oxylabs. The deepest documented targeting (ZIP, coordinates, ASN), HTTP3 support, 24-hour sticky sessions, and the most mature compliance program, from $30/mo for 5 GB down to $2.50/GB at 1 TB (July 2026 pricing). Choose it when data precision and auditability outrank sticker price.
• Best value (runner-up): Decodo. Most of the Oxylabs feature set from $11.25/mo plus VAT, with the only genuinely low-risk trial terms in the group (3-day trial, 14-day money-back). The default for startups and SMBs.
• Best for maximum scale: Bright Data. The largest claimed pool (400M+ IPs) and $2.50/GB at committed volume — if your organization can pass a corporate, human-reviewed KYC.
• Best budget and burst workloads: IPRoyal. Never-expiring traffic from $7.35/GB and 7-day sticky sessions, minus ZIP and ASN targeting and minus a safety net if it does not work out.

Whichever way you lean, validate before you commit — the one step I would treat as non-negotiable: run each candidate's trial (or IPRoyal's 1 GB minimum) against your actual target list, measure success rates on your own workload rather than trusting vendor claims, and re-check live pricing. Our provider selection framework turns that into a checklist, and when we complete our own benchmark program, this page will be the first one updated.