🔍 The Best Proxy Providers — Summer 2025

The residential proxy market continues to evolve, shaped by competition, innovation, and shifting user expectations. A major technical review conducted by Zetta Proxies in Summer 2025 provided rare transparency into the inner workings of residential proxy networks — covering everything from pool size to IP uniqueness and regional rotation behavior.

In this review, we analyze that report's findings in light of this year’s market trends — and highlight the performance metrics that matter most for scraping professionals.

🔍 Key Takeaways

This report examines a cross-section of the residential proxy industry based on real-world performance benchmarks. From a broader field of 23 vendors, we’ve selected 8 well-known providers that represent a mix of scale, popularity, and market share.

Our evaluation focuses on four critical metrics:

• Observed IP Pool Size – showing how many usable IPs are surfaced in practice
• Latency – measuring connection speed across multiple stages
• Pricing – comparing entry-level pay-as-you-go rates per GB
• Technical Success Rate – identifying how reliably each provider completes requests

Together, these benchmarks provide a grounded view of which vendors offer the best combination of speed, scale, reliability, and cost-efficiency for today’s proxy users.

📌 Vendor Pool Sizes

📝 Note:
This test was conducted using 100 RPS over 30 minutes, totaling 180,000 requests.
It does not reflect the full pool size of each provider, but rather illustrates how many unique IPs can be surfaced within a limited window.
For example, in a 360-minute test, Bright Data revealed over 400,000 unique US IPs, showing that longer durations expose deeper parts of each provider’s network.

United States

United Kingdom

Many proxy providers, including those in this test, advertise large pool sizes such as 50 million or 100 million IPs, often representing cumulative totals over time. While common in the industry, these figures don’t necessarily reflect what users can access in real usage. This benchmark instead highlights usable IPs within a session. It gives a clearer picture of real-world availability, helping consumers choose based on performance rather than inflated marketing. For most users, this is a far more practical metric.

🕒 Average Vendor Latency

📝 Note:
All latency times are in ms and were measured under the same conditions as the unique IP count test —
100 requests per second over 30 minutes, totaling 180,000 requests per provider.

This section measures how quickly each provider responds at different connection stages, with TTFB being the most critical metric. A lower TTFB means faster access to the first byte of data, which is essential for latency-sensitive use cases like sneaker & ticket botting, or real-time price monitoring—where even milliseconds can determine success. While other values offer insight into backend performance, TTFB best reflects the provider’s real-world speed under pressure. If your operations rely on rapid page loads or instant reactions to online releases, this metric should be your top priority.

💵 Advertised Vendor Pricing

📝 Note:
Prices shown below are the advertised starting pay-as-you-go rates per GB for each provider's residential proxy offering.

While advertised rates offer a useful baseline, they don’t always reflect long-term or high-volume discounts. Still, they give a quick look at which providers are more accessible for testing, small-scale scraping, or flexible use. For most consumers, balancing price against performance (like TTFB or IP uniqueness) is key to finding the right fit. Lower-cost providers can offer excellent value when paired with strong technical benchmarks.

🔗 Average Vendor Success Rate

📝 Note:
This chart shows the technical success rate measured over 30 minutes at 100 requests per second, using a 10-second deadline.
Any request that timed out, failed to connect, or returned a transport/proxy error was counted as a failure.

A high success rate means the provider can reliably handle requests without errors or timeouts—even under pressure. This is especially important for large-scale operations where failed requests can inflate costs or disrupt data pipelines. While most providers perform well, small differences in reliability can add up significantly over millions of requests. For consumers, success rate is a core metric to watch—particularly when uptime, reliability, or predictable performance are business-critical.

📈 Final Thoughts: Provider-by-Provider Summary

Choosing the right residential proxy provider isn’t about one metric—it’s about finding the best fit for your budget, performance needs, and reliability expectations. Below is a breakdown of how each provider performed across the board, and where they may be best suited for use.

Zetta Proxies

Zetta Proxies delivered a strong balance across all categories, including a large usable IP pool in both the US and UK, fast TTFB performance, competitive pricing ($1.30/GB), and a high success rate (99.59%). With infrastructure designed for scale and real-time performance, it’s especially well-suited for scraping, sneaker botting, ticket botting and price monitoring at scale without breaking the budget.

Bright Data

With one of the largest observed IP pools and strong global infrastructure, Bright Data remains a top-tier provider. However, its higher latency and most expensive starting price ($5.04/GB) make it better suited for enterprise-grade operations where breadth and global reach matter more than budget efficiency. Still, its performance is consistent, and its tools are feature-rich.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs ranked among the top for success rate and IP availability but had noticeably higher latency—especially in TTFB and handshake time. This makes it a solid choice for batch scraping, compliance testing, or use cases where stability is more important than speed. Pricing is on the premium side ($4.00/GB), so it's better for users prioritizing reliability and support.

NetNut

NetNut showed good IP coverage and a fairly strong success rate, with mid-range latency across most layers. Priced moderately at $3.53/GB, it’s a good middle-ground option for general-purpose scraping, especially if the project requires global distribution without ultra-low latency.

Infatica

Infatica stood out for low TTFB and DNS resolution times—great for high-speed tasks like real-time monitoring or botting. Its pool size was solid, and success rate reasonably high (99.11%), though pricing is on par with Oxylabs at $4.00/GB. A solid technical performer, especially for latency-sensitive workloads.

Decodo (Smartproxy)

Decodo offered consistently good latency (second-best TTFB), a decent pool size, and one of the highest success rates (99.75%) at a fair $3.50/GB price. It’s a versatile, well-balanced provider ideal for mid-sized scraping operations, marketing intelligence, and even botting tasks that need both speed and reliability.

IPRoyal

IPRoyal surprised with one of the best success rates (99.84%) and decent latency performance. Its pool size is smaller, but that’s offset by stability and a moderate price of $3.68/GB. Best suited for small-to-medium workloads where consistency and uptime are more important than scale.

GeoNode

GeoNode had the lowest pricing among mainstream providers but also showed higher latency and the lowest success rate (98.14%). Its performance may vary by use case, but it's a budget-friendly option for non-critical tasks or geo-specific scraping where cost-efficiency matters more than speed or volume.

🎯 Final Recommendation

For users needing raw speed and cost-efficiency, Zetta Proxies and Decodo stand out. For enterprise-scale reach with deep pools, Bright Data and Oxylabs remain leaders. And for budget-conscious stability, IPRoyal offers surprising value with great reliability.

Each provider has strengths—so the best choice depends on what matters most to your operation: scale, speed, stability, or price.