If you’re running a serious scraping operation in 2025, proxies are your lifeblood. They’re the difference between pulling millions of rows of clean data or burning through IP bans and timeouts. At Scrape Creators, I've tested many proxy providers over the years, and today I’m giving you the real talk about the ones I’ve actually used (or seriously considered).
This list isn’t just a ranking of "top" proxies, it’s my honest experience with each provider: what worked, what sucked, and what you should expect if you try them. Let’s get into it.
1. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)
Price: starts at $3/GB residential
Type: Rotating Residential, Static Residential, Datacenter
I’ve been a long-time user of Smartproxy, which recently rebranded as Decodo. Honestly, they're probably still one of the better deals out there for web scraping. Their rotating residential proxies are solid.
I rarely have day to day issues with them.
That said, they really pissed me off when they randomly changed their proxy endpoint URLs and broke a bunch of my scripts.
And then they rebranded weirdly.
If you go with Decodo, be ready for occasional reconfigurations.
Verdict: Still one of my go-tos for daily scraping. Just expect once a quarter or once a year to have to change a domain or something.
2. Evomi
Price: $0.49/GB residential, incredibly cheap
Type: Rotating Residential, Static Residential
Evomi looks like a dream on paper: dirt-cheap residential proxies and simple dashboard. But once I started running real volume through them, the problems showed up fast. Requests would hang, not fail, just hang, which is arguably worse because you can't even retry. Their static proxies had the same issue.
Customer service? Unprofessional as hell. And they don't communicate outages, which became frequent toward the end when I used them.
I still use them, but not to a large scale.
I have to pray that nothing breaks when I use them.
Verdict: Not worth the headache, no matter how cheap. If they fixed their infrastructure, happy to divert all traffic back to them.
3. Webshare
Price: Starts at $3.50/GB residential
Type: Static Residential, Datacenter, Rotating Residential
I haven’t personally used Webshare, but I know a lot of scrapers who do. For static IPs, they’re probably the cheapest game in town, $0.30 per IP starting out.
You’ll want to test heavily before going all-in, but for small projects or non-sensitive scraping, they’re hard to beat on price.
Verdict: Budget-friendly static proxy provider. Worth testing for low-risk scraping.
4. IPRoyal
Price: $3.50/GB residential
Type: Residential, Mobile, Datacenter
Another one I haven’t run at scale myself, but I’ve seen other developers use them without major complaints. They offer a wide variety of proxy types (including mobile), which is a plus if you’re scraping harder targets.
They haven’t earned a permanent spot in my rotation yet, but they’re on my radar.
Verdict: A wildcard option. Could be solid, but I’d run controlled tests before relying on them.
5. DataImpulse
Price: Starts at $1/GB (rotating residential)
Type: Rotating Residential, ISP, Datacenter
This is one of the newer players I’ve tried. For $1/GB, it’s honestly a steal. I’ve only used them lightly, as a backup when other proxies failed, but I had zero problems. No hangs, no weird errors. For the price, the performance was impressive.
Thinking about switching back to them for more regular usage just based on cost-effectiveness alone.
Verdict: Great bang-for-your-buck proxy provider. Could be the hidden gem of this list.
Bonus: Bright Data
Price: $4.20/GB (residential)
Type: Residential, ISP, Mobile, Datacenter
Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is the biggest and most enterprise-tier proxy provider in the space.
Their founder, Or Lenchner, is a genuinely good guy, and their platform is solid.
The only downside? Price. They are the most expensive out there. At $4.20+/GB, you’re definitely paying premium. If you’re running a lean operation, it might be hard to justify the cost.
Verdict: Enterprise-grade performance, if you can afford it.
Final Thoughts
Your proxy provider can make or break your scraping workflow.
My recommendation: Decodo.
As of August 2025 that is my preferred proxy provider.
Competitive pricing and you don't have to babysit the proxies.
But if you are scraping social media or ad libraries, we can handle all this for you, don't even worry about proxies.
If you just want clean data and a simple scraping experience, skip the proxy headaches entirely.
Use Scrape Creators, we handle all the proxy management, rotation, retries, and edge cases for you.
Focus on building your product. We'll handle the messy stuff.