The best proxy provider is not a company. It is whichever provider produces a usable result most cheaply for your website, page type and volume, and because provider efficiency is so uneven, at scale that choice becomes a routing and validation problem.
Every few weeks someone asks me the same question: which proxy provider is the best?
It is a reasonable question. Every comparison post on Google promises an answer. Every provider's homepage claims to be it.
And every developer who has burned a weekend switching providers wants a name they can stop thinking about.
There isn't one.
At ScrapeOps we currently route billions of requests a month through more than 50 proxy providers and scraping APIs. The same provider can be the cheapest, fastest option on one e-commerce site and one of the worst on another.
The winner can change between a product page and a search page on the same domain. It changes again when volume goes from 10,000 pages to 1 million.
What you are actually buying is not "a proxy". You are buying how efficiently a particular provider has learned to solve a particular target.
That efficiency is uneven, commercially motivated, and hidden behind headline prices that rarely survive contact with a real URL.
For our eighth r/WebScrapingInsider AMA I sat in the guest seat myself and opened up four years of provider benchmarking data to the community. If I had to compress the whole thread into two sentences, it would be these:
There is no best proxy provider. There is only the best provider for your websites, workload and volume.
For context on where this comes from: I am the CEO and Co-Founder of ScrapeOps, a proxy aggregator that routes traffic across the proxy provider market and benchmarks providers against each other in production, across roughly 60,000 domains.
Before ScrapeOps I worked at ScraperAPI, one of the companies that established the modern web scraping API model. So I have seen this industry from both the provider side and the buyer side.
In the AMA, the community asked how to actually compare providers, why two providers can charge 20x apart for the same page, what success rate hides, and where the economics of anti-scraping are heading.
Here are the nine biggest insights from the discussion.