Best proxy providers in 2026, compared by criteria

The short answer

For most jobs the answer is a residential network priced per gigabyte with real country, state and city targeting; for accounts, apps and antidetect profiles that expect a phone, a mobile network with named carriers and sticky sessions. On both, QuanticData is the row we would pick from the tables below: $1.00/GB residential with a free trial, $5 for 1 GB of mobile bandwidth falling to $2.30/GB, one-off packs that never renew, no KYC, and measured rows for every number, published in the residential test (170 requests, 10 countries, 50/50 geo match) and the mobile test (98 requests, 8 countries, 40/40 geo match, 23 carrier ASNs).

That is our position and we state it plainly. What this page adds is the method: the six criteria that decide a purchase, a table of what each proxy type is for, and the entry prices other providers publish on their own pages, so you can rank them yourself. Nobody here is linked, sponsored or paid; the other names are in plain text, priced from their pricing pages on the dates given.

The six criteria that decide, and how to check them

Every "best proxies" list ranks by feel. These six questions rank by fact, and each has a way to verify the answer before paying.

Two of them carry most of the weight. Price per GB is the only unit that lets you compare providers at all: a port "from $8.49 a day" and a pack "from $2.30 a GB" only meet if you push more than 3.7 GB through that one port every day. Session length is where cheap networks fail quietly: a login that needs 40 minutes on one address cannot run on a 10-minute session, whatever the price.

Proxy types compared: residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter, IPv6

"Best proxies" is five different questions, because five kinds of address exist and sites treat them differently. The table maps each to the job it is bought for.

A rule that saves money: start with the cheapest network the target accepts and move up only when you measure a block. Datacenter and IPv6 for the sites that do not check origin, residential for the ones that do, mobile for the ones that expect a phone or an account that must look like one. The proxy tester builds the curl, Python and Node commands to run that check on your own targets in about ten minutes.

Published entry prices: residential proxies, 14 providers

Entry prices as each provider publishes them, read on 8 September 2026 for the residential test. The QuanticData row is the same pool and price list sold on QuantumProxies. Entry price is the smallest real purchase's rate per GB; "not published" means the page states no figure.

Read across, not down: two providers match our $1.00/GB entry price, and one of them asks $50 as a first purchase where we ask $5 and give 100 MB free. Monthly plans that reset unused bandwidth are the other thing to look for; a one-off pack valid 30 to 360 days is the cheaper way to buy anything you do not consume in a straight line. Full test and rows: best residential proxies in 2026, tested.

Published entry prices: mobile proxies, 15 providers

Mobile is where pricing models diverge most: per GB, per port per week, per device per month, or simply unpublished. The full table with all 15 rows, the per-GB versus per-port arithmetic and the measured per-country rows is on best mobile proxies in 2026, by criteria; the short version is below.

Two providers publish a lower per-GB entry than ours; neither publishes a minimum spend, and neither states whether packs expire. We publish all three, which is the point of the table.

Best proxies by country

Country changes the answer more than most lists admit: which carriers can be named, how many regions and cities the catalog lists, what the local search results are full of (free lists, in Italy's case), and what we measured from that country's exits. One page per market, same six criteria:

• Best proxies for the US: T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, UScellular and C Spire selectable, 37 regions and 100 cities in the mobile catalog.
• Best proxies for the UK: Three, BT and O2 selectable, 35 cities; the query where a top-ranked Reddit thread says mobile beats residential.
• Best proxies for Germany: O2, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone selectable, 12 regions and 26 cities.
• Best proxies for Italy: TIM, Vodafone Italia, WindTre, Fastweb and Tiscali selectable, 13 regions and 27 cities.
• Best proxies for Spain: Orange España, Yoigo, Telefónica, Aire Networks and Digi Spain selectable, 8 regions and 12 cities.

Every other country has its own page under mobile proxies (194 catalog pages, carriers by name) and proxy locations (residential, ISP and datacenter coverage by market).

Best proxies for antidetect browsers

Multilogin, GoLogin, AdsPower, Dolphin Anty and Incogniton all take one proxy per profile, and the profile lives or dies on session stickiness: one session ID, a lifetime that covers the time the profile is open, a country that matches the account. Best mobile proxies for antidetect browsers compares networks on the seven criteria a profile needs and links to a setup page per browser: Multilogin, GoLogin, AdsPower, Dolphin Anty and Incogniton, each with the "proxy check failed" fixes that people search for more often than the product itself.

How we rank, and what we do not claim

Our numbers are measured; theirs are published. Everything stated about QuanticData comes from requests we ran and attached as raw rows: 170 residential requests across 10 countries on 8 September 2026 and 98 mobile requests across 8 countries on 13 September 2026, each with country match, ASN, time to first byte and a public fraud score per exit. Everything stated about other providers is an entry price copied from their own pricing page on the date given, nothing more: no performance figure, no pool size, no uptime, because we did not test them and will not guess.

What this does not prove. One network, a few afternoons, five runs per country: a single slow handset moves a median, and none of it says anything about success rates on sites that fingerprint or challenge. Prices change; the dates are on every table and we refresh them when we refresh the tests. If a figure here disagrees with a provider's page today, the page wins.