Proxy Benchmark Report — Q3 2026
Across 120,000 identical requests sent between 1 July – 15 August 2026, Bright Data recorded the highest mean success rate (95.9%) against Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX and Akamai protected targets, ahead of Oxylabs (95.1%) and Nimbleway (93.3%).
Full results — success rate by anti-bot stack
| # | Provider | Mean success | Cloudflare | DataDome | PerimeterX | Akamai | Median TTFB | Cost / 1k successes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bright Data | 95.9% | 98.4% | 96.1% | 95.3% | 93.8% | 612 ms | $4.12 |
| 2 | Oxylabs | 95.1% | 97.9% | 95.4% | 94.6% | 92.7% | 588 ms | $4.38 |
| 3 | Nimbleway | 93.3% | 96.8% | 93.9% | 92.1% | 90.4% | 664 ms | $4.90 |
| 4 | Decodo | 92.3% | 96.2% | 92.8% | 91.4% | 88.9% | 701 ms | $2.71 |
| 5 | SOAX | 91.5% | 95.6% | 92% | 90.8% | 87.6% | 742 ms | $3.05 |
| 6 | NetNut | 90.3% | 94.9% | 90.7% | 89.3% | 86.1% | 596 ms | $3.44 |
| 7 | IPRoyal | 88.8% | 93.7% | 89.4% | 87.8% | 84.2% | 812 ms | $2.18 |
| 8 | ProxyEmpire | 86.5% | 91.8% | 87.1% | 85.4% | 81.7% | 905 ms | $3.62 |
| 9 | Infatica | 85.4% | 90.9% | 86.2% | 84.1% | 80.3% | 948 ms | $3.28 |
| 10 | Rayobyte | 84.1% | 90.1% | 84.8% | 82.9% | 78.6% | 878 ms | $2.64 |
| 11 | Proxy-Cheap | 82.0% | 88.6% | 82.9% | 80.4% | 76.1% | 1012 ms | $2.35 |
| 12 | Webshare | 76.4% | 84.2% | 76.8% | 74.9% | 69.8% | 468 ms | $1.24 |
Results by region
- US East (N. Virginia) — mean success 95.1%, median TTFB 604 ms. Deepest residential supply; sticky sessions hold longest here.
- US West (Oregon) — mean success 94.4%, median TTFB 641 ms. Slightly thinner mobile supply than US East on every network tested.
- EU Central (Frankfurt) — mean success 93.6%, median TTFB 588 ms. Fastest median TTFB overall, strongest ISP-proxy availability.
- APAC (Singapore) — mean success 88.7%, median TTFB 1024 ms. Largest gap between top and bottom providers — 21.4 points.
Results by target vertical
- E-commerce / price monitoring — 94.8% mean success, dominant blocker DataDome + Akamai. Residential rotating wins; datacenter IPs fail above ~40 req/min.
- Search engine results (SERP) — 96.3% mean success, dominant blocker Google rate limiting. Dedicated SERP APIs beat raw proxies by 6–9 points at the same spend.
- Travel & airline fares — 86.4% mean success, dominant blocker Akamai Bot Manager. Hardest vertical tested; session stability matters more than pool size.
- Social platforms — 90.2% mean success, dominant blocker Fingerprint + behaviour scoring. Mobile IPs outperform residential by 7.8 points.
- Ad verification — 93.1% mean success, dominant blocker Geo/carrier validation. Carrier-level targeting accuracy, not raw success rate, is the deciding metric.
Methodology: how we test. Compare the shortlist: all providers side by side. Dataset licensed CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-08-20.