9 Best Proxy Providers for 2026: A Residential and Datacenter Comparison to Guide Your Choice

Proxy budgets leak in a quiet way. A team buys a monthly allowance sized for its busiest week, uses a fraction of it in a slow month and watches the remainder vanish at renewal. Nobody notices until someone adds up a year of invoices.

The leak is built into many pricing models. Some providers attach a validity window to every purchase, others reset commitments each billing cycle, and a few keep whatever you do not use. Datacenter plans sold by the IP sidestep the issue but bring their own trade: you pay for addresses whether they move traffic or not. Either way, the cost of idle capacity rarely appears on a pricing page.

This comparison weighs nine providers across residential and datacenter on that basis. Price matters, but so does how much of each purchase survives a quiet month. Each entry below notes the provider's expiry rule alongside its residential and datacenter entry points, with pros and cons kept short and factual.

Weighed on What You Keep and What You Pay

ProxyEmpire (best for rollover bandwidth)

ProxyEmpire keeps every gigabyte bought on its GB-based plans: nothing expires, and no contract locks the buyer in. Where other models reset commitments each cycle or put a 30-day clock on purchases, a ProxyEmpire balance simply carries forward, and the rule covers residential, mobile and datacenter bandwidth plans alike. For agencies and data teams whose workload swings with clients and seasons, that turns overbuying from a loss into a reserve.

The menu is broad enough to keep everything in one place. Residential runs $3.50 a gigabyte with no commitment, datacenter bandwidth starts with a $25 monthly plan for 40 GB, and mobile costs $4.50 a gigabyte. Filters down to postcode, ASN and mobile carrier carry no surcharge, and a $1.97 trial puts residential and mobile traffic on the test bench. The firm caveat: every sale is final.

Pros:

• Purchased GB never lapse
• Residential, datacenter, mobile and ISP under one login
• Location filters included in the price

Cons:

• No money-back guarantee
• The trial leaves out datacenter

IPRoyal (best for non-expiring residential traffic)

IPRoyal shares the no-expiry philosophy on residential, with no monthly minimum, so a project can pause for months without losing a cent of traffic. Sticky residential IPs can stay assigned for up to a week, which suits long account sessions. Workspace roles and 2FA make the account safe to share across a team.

Datacenter is sold per proxy at $1.39 and up in more than 60 locations. On residential, a lone gigabyte on subscription costs $7, and only 10 TB orders reach the $1.75 rate, so the model rewards scale.

Pros:

• Residential balances never lapse
• IPs that can hold for days

Cons:

• Expensive at small volumes
• Postcode and ASN filters absent from its listing

SOAX (best for capped spending)

SOAX tackles waste from the other direction. Instead of carrying unused traffic, it lets administrators put hard caps on each package, along with protocol limits and domain rules, so spending cannot run past what a project should use.

Residential and mobile share one credit-based rate tied to country tier; the plan builder shows US traffic at $3 a gigabyte on a 100 GB plan. Datacenter does not appear in its product list, so mixed workloads need a second vendor.

Pros:

• Hard spending caps per package
• SOCKS5 carried over UDP as well as TCP

Cons:

• Rates shift by country
• Datacenter absent

Webshare (best for free datacenter access)

Webshare removes the first-month risk entirely on datacenter: ten proxies are free for good, with no card, and the first paid pack of 100 runs $2.99 monthly. That makes it the gentlest entry point here for teams still sizing their needs.

On residential, one gigabyte costs $3.50, and plans can be billed monthly or yearly and shaped around exact proxy counts, bandwidth and locations. Larger buyers reach $1.40 a gigabyte from 250 GB.

Pros:

• Datacenter tier that stays free
• Small, inexpensive datacenter packs

Cons:

• No mobile product
• No residential trial mentioned

NodeMaven (best for filtered residential IPs)

NodeMaven carries leftover bandwidth into the next period on both monthly and flexible plans, then adds a second incentive: up to 10% back on traffic actually used. Every address passes a real-time reputation check before assignment, and sticky sessions can hold for a full day, which suits account management.

It stops short of datacenter, offering ISP proxies instead from $2.33 an address for 30 days, with unlimited traffic on those.

Pros:

• Rollover combined with cashback
• IPs screened before use

Cons:

• Datacenter not sold
• Mobile pool listed at 250K IPs

Oxylabs (best for bundled scraping tools)

Oxylabs takes a subscription approach: one monthly budget, from $30, spent across residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies and its scraping APIs. Whether unused subscription value carries over is not stated on the pages reviewed. A $5 welcome credit lets buyers test before choosing a tier.

Residential slides from $6 to $2.50 a gigabyte with volume, and datacenter pricing is not shown in the published details covered here.

Pros:

• One invoice for proxies and scraping tools
• Location filters included

Cons:

• Steep first residential tier
• Subscription required

Bright Data (best for enterprise scale)

Bright Data offers the largest residential network in this group, which it puts at more than 400 million IPs a month, alongside over 1.3 million datacenter addresses. Datacenter starts at $14 monthly for 10 IPs, and flexible residential costs $4 a gigabyte with the RESIGB50 code.

Committed monthly spend that goes unused is not carried forward, a trade many enterprises accept in exchange for scale and published certifications. A free trial with no card and a deposit match up to $500 soften the first commitment.

Pros:

• Very large residential pool
• Certifications including ISO 27001 and SOC 2

Cons:

• Unused commitments lapse
• KYC before residential access

Proxy-Seller (best for per-IP static formats)

Proxy-Seller sells static formats by the address, including datacenter from two cents and IPv4, IPv6 and ISP options, and residential from $1.45 a gigabyte on volume plans.

Residential purchases must be used within 30 days, which works for teams with even monthly demand and less well for campaign-driven buyers. Unlimited concurrent sessions and a long operating history, dating to 2014, are the counterweights.

Pros:

• Wide range of static formats
• Low volume residential rate

Cons:

• Residential gigabytes lapse after a month
• One-day refund window

Decodo (best for a free trial)

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) lets newcomers run residential traffic free for three days and sells datacenter IPs from two cents each. Monthly residential begins at $3.75 a gigabyte on the 3 GB plan.

The site does not say whether unused subscription gigabytes carry over, and the trial becomes a paid plan unless it is cancelled in time.

Pros:

• Trial with no upfront cost
• Low per-IP datacenter entry

Cons:

• Rollover policy not stated
• Trial converts automatically

Residential and Datacenter Compared

Provider	Residential starting point	Datacenter starting point	Leftover residential traffic
ProxyEmpire	$3.50 a gigabyte, no commitment	40 GB plan at $25 monthly	Carried forward indefinitely
IPRoyal	$7 for one gigabyte	$1.39 per proxy	Never lapses
SOAX	Set by country tier	Not listed	Not stated
Webshare	$3.50 for one gigabyte	Pack of 100 at $2.99 monthly	Not stated
NodeMaven	$2.20 a gigabyte, monthly	Not listed	Carried forward
Oxylabs	$6 a gigabyte, first tier	Not stated	Not stated
Bright Data	$4 a gigabyte with code	10 IPs at $14 monthly	Unused commitments lapse
Proxy-Seller	$1.45 a gigabyte, volume	Two cents, unit per menu	Expires after 30 days
Decodo	$3.75 a gigabyte, 3 GB plan	Two cents per IP	Not stated

Which Provider Should You Choose?

Choose ProxyEmpire if your usage swings month to month and you want residential, datacenter and mobile GB that never expire on one account.

Choose IPRoyal if you need non-expiring residential traffic with long sticky sessions.

Choose Webshare if you want to start with free datacenter proxies.

Choose Bright Data if enterprise scale and certifications outweigh rollover.

Choose Proxy-Seller if your demand is steady and you want low per-GB volume rates.