Proxy and Scraping Provider Comparisons

What actually decides the best proxy provider for a scraping workload

Most vendor comparison tables rank on pool size and headline price per gigabyte. Neither predicts whether your job finishes. The best proxy provider for one workload is the wrong one for the next, because the deciding variable is how a specific target responds to a specific kind of traffic at your concurrency.

Five criteria separate providers once you get past the marketing table:

• Block rate under sustained load, measured on your own targets rather than a vendor demo page. The failure modes worth logging are described in web scraping without getting blocked.
• IP provenance. Where the addresses come from, and whether the provider can document how they were sourced.
• Session persistence. How long one identity survives, and what breaks when it rotates mid-flow.
• Geographic granularity. Country-level targeting is table stakes; city, carrier, and ASN are where offers genuinely differ.
• Cost per successful request, counted after retries.

Why per-gigabyte pricing hides the real number

Bandwidth billing charges the same for a blocked response as for the page you wanted. Challenge pages, redirect chains, and 403s all consume traffic. When block rate on your target runs high, a large share of the invoice buys nothing.

Convert every quote to cost per successful request before you compare. Take the price per gigabyte, multiply by the mean size of a successful response, then divide by the success rate you measured yourself. Providers whose headline bandwidth prices differ several times over can finish close together once retries are priced in, and the ranking sometimes inverts.

Where the cheaper option is the right call

Datacenter ranges are faster and cost a fraction of residential traffic. On targets that do not fingerprint, they are simply the correct choice: public APIs, sitemaps, documentation, most open-data portals. Paying residential rates there is waste. The trade-off is written out in datacenter vs residential proxies.

The same concession applies to managed scraping APIs. If you need a few product categories parsed on a schedule and you do not want to own the parser maintenance, a managed endpoint is less work than any infrastructure you would run yourself. Real consumer smartphones earn their cost somewhere narrower: sessions that must hold state, survive scrutiny, and keep working through logged-in flows, multi-step forms, and mobile-only interfaces.

How to run the comparison yourself

Vendor tables are written by vendors, including this one. A two-week bake-off produces better evidence than any of them, and most providers will hand you trial credit to run it.

• Pick three targets you actually care about, including the one that blocks you most often today.
• Hold the client constant. Same Playwright or Puppeteer script, same concurrency, same headers, across every provider.
• Log outcomes rather than averages: status code, challenge type, time to first byte, and bytes transferred, per request.
• Run for at least a full week. Block rates move with the target’s release schedule, not yours.
• Score on cost per successful request and on p95 latency, not the mean. The tail is where production breaks.

Apply the same scrutiny to the numbers on this page. Archonum runs agent traffic on 250,000+ real consumer smartphones across 175+ countries, with the browser on the phone that owns the IP rather than routed through it. That claim is worth exactly what your own test says it is worth. More background on detection and session behaviour sits in the blog.