Proxies for Scraping: Residential vs. Datacenter vs. Unblocker Benchmark

Proxy vendors advertise 95–99 % success rates. On sites that actively block bots, we see 55–75 %. We have sent requests through residential, datacenter, and unblockers every ~5 minutes, from servers in different countries.

Proxy type matters more than the vendor. For example, on the same targets, unblockers return ~10–25 more real pages per 100 than datacenter proxies.

Proxy benchmark results for web scraping

Success rate by provider

Response time by provider

Real-world success is far below advertised rates:

On protected sites, residential and datacenter proxies typically land between 55 % and 75 % on a given day, not the 95–99 % seen on vendor pages.

The difference comes from three ways of measuring. First, success means the site’s real response arrived: a CAPTCHA or login wall served with HTTP 200 counts as a failure, while many vendor figures count it as a success. Second, we test sites that actively block bots, not the easy traffic that raises all-customer averages. Third, requests go through about 17 000 URLs instead of repeating one page, so caching doesn’t help.

Unblockers differ in success, but far more in speed:

The best and worst unblockers are 5–20 points apart, and the ranking has been stable within each period. Decodo has stayed at or near the top throughout, while Zyte has trailed it by ~5–10 points.

Response times differ much more. Stability matters as much as the median: a tight timeout that suits a ~2-second unblocker would turn many of a slower vendor’s successful requests into failures. For batch jobs, success rate matters more than time. For anything a user waits on, only a ~2-second unblocker behaves like a proxy.

Choosing a proxy type for scraping

Choose your proxy type based on your target and workload, not the brand. Proxy type affects your success rate and costs more than the vendor.

1. How hard does the target block? Send 100 requests through a cheap datacenter proxy first. If more than ~60 % return real pages, you may not need anything more expensive.
2. How much volume? Above ~100 GB a month, a 10-point success gap costs real money, so cost per successful page matters more than list price.
3. Batch or real-time? If results feed a user who is waiting, response time rules out slow unblockers. For overnight batch jobs, it barely matters.

Residential proxies: what the data shows

Residential providers are more similar than their marketing suggests. Their average scores differ by about 8 points, and the top provider changes every day.

Four trends have appeared in our residential data:

• While average performance remains stable, daily results often fluctuate. A provider’s score can change by 20 points in a day and over 40 points in a week.
• Consistency is important. Some providers offer stable results, while others experience both the highest and lowest benchmark scores.
• A provider’s performance may decline and stay low. Using a backup provider can help reduce this risk. Managing risk is more important than focusing on success rates. In our benchmark, Oxylabs is consistently among the fastest providers. In contrast, Apify is the slowest.

Datacenter proxies: when they are enough

On Google, Instagram, TikTok, Walmart, X, Yandex and YouTube, datacenter proxies typically return real pages 55–75 % of the time.

Based on our benchmark data:

• Datacenter is often enough. Even on these heavily protected sites, datacenter proxies returned real pages more than half the time on most days. Try datacenter first and escalate for the targets where it fails.
• The speed advantage is modest. Datacenter medians sit around 1.5–2.0 seconds, while residential medians mostly fall between 2.0 and 2.5 seconds on their own targets. On its own, speed is rarely a reason to choose datacenter.
• Higher success often comes with slower responses. Webshare posted the highest datacenter success in its period but was also the slowest, at ~1.7–2.4 seconds. Apify was the fastest and the least successful. A provider that takes longer may be doing more work per request, such as retrying internally.

Web unblockers

Unblockers have returned ~10–25 more real pages out of every 100 than datacenter proxies on the same targets. The vendor you pick decides how much latency you pay for the extra success.

• Match delay to the task. For batch collection, where results need to come within tens of seconds, the most effective unblocker wins, even if it is slow. For anything a user waits for, an unblocker that takes about 2 seconds works like a proxy.
• Check whether failures are billed. Many unblockers charge only for successful requests. If so, a lower success rate costs you time and retries, not money.

Do you need a proxy at all? Proxy vs. scraper API

For popular sites with a dedicated scraper API, raw proxies are usually the more expensive choice once engineering time is counted.

In our web scraping benchmark, scraper APIs cost about the same as residential proxies but return structured JSON instead of raw HTML. Several of those benchmarks saw close to 100 % success for every provider, well above what proxies achieve on similar sites.

We used to fetch HTML through unblockers and parse fields with CSS selectors, and every site redesign sent work back to our engineers. Once we saw that scraper APIs cost no more than the unblockers we were using, we moved most of our collection to them.

Proxies still make sense when:

• No API exists for the site, or the API does not return the fields you need.
• You scrape many different sites at modest volume each, where maintaining one proxy setup beats buying many APIs.
• You have a strong technical team and data costs decide your margins.
• You need full control over headers, sessions and timing.

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Methodology

We send HTTP requests through each provider to popular sites that filter bots to verify whether the actual page is returned. Four servers in France, the US, Singapore, and Brazil run identical tests every 20 minutes. The tests are staggered so a new batch is sent about every five minutes. Results are aggregated daily and combined from all four locations.

Sites come from SimilarWeb’s traffic ranking for each market. We keep a site only if our servers can access it, it has product, listing, profile, or search pages worth collecting data from, and those pages clearly indicate they are real pages, not a block screen.

If a browser gets more real pages than a simple request, we test that website with a headless browser for each provider. Unblockers don’t use a browser because they return content that’s already been processed.

A request is successful if it returns HTTP 404, meaning the proxy reached the site but the page is missing, or HTTP 200–399 with a known content marker for that website, like a-price-whole on Amazon or x-item-title__mainTitle on eBay. For sites that use a lot of JavaScript and do not have a steady marker, responses smaller than a certain size count as failures.

We measure response time from when the proxy receives the request until it delivers the full page content. We only count successful plain HTTP requests. The daily reported value is the median.

FAQ

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@misc{karatas2026,
  author = {Karatas, Gulbahar},
  title  = {{Proxies for Scraping: Residential vs. Datacenter vs. Unblocker Benchmark}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = oct,
  howpublished    = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/proxy-for-scraping}},
  note   = {AIMultiple. Consulté le 2 octobre 2026}
}

Gulbahar Karatas

Analyste sectorielle

Suivre

Gülbahar est analyste sectorielle chez AIMultiple, spécialisée dans la collecte de données web, les applications des données web et la sécurité des applications.

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