Top Cheap Shared Proxies: Benchmark Results & Providers Compared
Shared proxies are the entry point for most scraping operations; they’re cheap enough to test with and abundant enough to scale. That trade-off plays out differently depending on which proxy type you’re buying.
In our benchmark across residential, datacenter, and mobile shared proxy networks, the performance spread between providers was wide in some categories and nearly nonexistent in others.
Shared proxy benchmark results
Success rate
The most useful finding from our success rate tests is also the most counterintuitive: the category you choose matters far more than the provider you choose in residential and mobile. See methodology for shared proxy benchmark.
Response time
Price comparison of the shared proxies
The pricing details for the providers listed in the table are for shared residential proxies.
Pros & cons of the best shared proxies
Bright Data’s shared proxy offering spans residential, ISP, and datacenter networks, with more proxy types under one account than most providers here.
The configuration options differ by product: city-level targeting isn’t available on shared proxies (country-level), and for ISP and datacenter you choose between paying per GB for full pool access or purchasing a fixed allocation of sticky IPs. Bright Data consistently sits below the median response time in ISP and datacenter tests, which matters if you’re running time-sensitive workloads.
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Visit WebsiteDecodo’s standout number in our benchmark is its ISP success rate: 39%, the single highest score across any provider and proxy type we tested. All Decodo plans (except the dedicated ISP and datacenter plans) provide access to shared IP addresses. City-level targeting is available for residential and mobile plans. For both ISP and datacenter proxies, you have two billing options:
- Unlimited pool access: Entire IP pool and pay for the traffic you use (pay-per-GB).
- Fixed IP allocation: A specific number of “sticky” IPs.
Residential proxies from $2/GB, no coupon needed
Visit WebsiteWebshare offers shared datacenter and ISP proxy networks. The provider also offers semi-dedicated proxies, shared with at most two users. Webshare is commonly used as a lower-cost entry point for shared datacenter/ISP-style proxies.
In our datacenter benchmark, Webshare’s success rate falls in the 40–65% range alongside Decodo and Apify, with response times remaining steady at 2–3 seconds, consistent, if unspectacular. By default, proxies are static; auto-rotation requires adding it to your plan. Unlimited bandwidth kicks in at the 1,000-proxy threshold, which means bandwidth costs are a real consideration on smaller plans.
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Visit WebsiteOxylabs provides shared datacenter IPs in 15 locations, including the United States, Europe, and Asia. The shared datacenter proxy network supports country-level targeting but not city-level targeting. These proxies rotate IPs by default with each new request. You can use session parameters or sticky entry nodes to maintain the same IP across multiple requests.
For mobile proxies, Oxylabs performs as well as any provider we tested, with success rates in the 40–60% range, response times of 1.6–2.6 seconds, and tracking Decodo almost exactly throughout the test period.
In shared residential, the picture is different: Oxylabs scored 25% in our tests, the lowest result in the residential category, and well below the 40–60% band where other providers cluster. That’s a meaningful gap, not a rounding error. If residential proxies are your primary need, the residential performance data here is a reason to look at other options first.
Try Oxylabs shared datacenter proxies for free (5 GB/mo)
Visit WebsiteIPRoyal’s shared residential proxies span 195 countries and don’t include a free trial. You can choose between subscription-based and pay-as-you-go models, and the subscription plan lets you specify exactly how many IPs you need.
In our residential benchmark, IPRoyal scored 37%, tied with Bright Data for the top result in that category. There’s also no free trial.
Rayobyte offers semi-dedicated datacenter and ISP proxies in the USA, Brazil, and Germany (shared among up to three users) and shared residential proxies. It’s shared proxies that rotate IPs every 10–120 minutes. They offer a two-day money-back guarantee for datacenter and ISP proxies.
What are shared proxies?
A shared proxy is an IP address that multiple customers route traffic through simultaneously. The cost is lower because it’s distributed, but so is the control. You don’t choose who else uses the IP, you don’t know what they’re doing with it, and if their behavior gets the IP flagged, you’re affected.
Types of shared proxies
By IP source:
- Shared datacenter proxies: Hosted in data centers, they’re fast and inexpensive. The term “shared” is often associated with affordability in the context of datacenter proxies. In contrast, residential and mobile proxies tend to cost more due to their unique origins.
- Shared residential proxies: Routed through real home ISPs and ideal for avoiding IP blocks.
By rotation behavior:
- Static shared proxies: Keep the same IP until you manually rotate
- Rotating shared proxies: IPs automatically switch, which is suitable for a data collection project.
By sharing intensity:
- Fully shared proxies: One IP is shared among many users.
- Semi-dedicated proxies: Shared with a small group (e.g., 2–5 users).
Add as preferred sourceWhen to use shared proxies?
Datacenter proxies: Static shared proxies are a good choice for targeting smaller or less-protected websites (e.g., those with basic CAPTCHA or simple rate limiting).
These sites typically lack the advanced defenses of major platforms like Google or Amazon. If you’re not sending a high volume of requests to the same site, static shared proxies can be an effective and budget-friendly option.
Rotating shared proxies: Shared proxy networks are ideal for scraping low-security websites, especially when you’re on a limited budget and need a large pool of IPs to distribute traffic.
While they offer a cost-effective solution, they come with trade-offs in terms of performance and reliability. For high-security sites, large-scale scraping, or when performance is a priority, rotating shared or private proxies are typically the more reliable options.
Shared proxies vs dedicated proxies
Performance
The key distinction between a shared proxy and a dedicated proxy lies in the number of users. A single user exclusively uses a dedicated or private proxy, while multiple users use a shared proxy.
With a dedicated proxy, you get a unique IP address, which improves speed and performance. In contrast, shared proxies assign the same IP address to multiple users. As more users share the same proxy, its speed and performance tend to decrease. A dedicated proxy ensures better performance since one user utilizes the IP address.
Anonymity
Shared proxies offer high anonymity. Since multiple users share the same IP address, it becomes difficult for websites to track any user’s activity. Even if your actions are monitored, your identity remains hidden because many users share the same IP.
Authority
With shared proxies, all users share the same IP address when browsing and making requests, and you have no visibility into others’ actions. This lack of control increases the risk of being blocked.
Since you can’t ensure that other users are following proper proxy usage practices, the risk of being flagged is higher compared to dedicated proxies. In contrast, a dedicated proxy grants you full control over your activity, as no one else shares your IP address. You are solely responsible for how it’s used.
Pricing
Dedicated proxies are more expensive because you bear the full cost, as they are exclusive. Shared proxies, on the other hand, are less costly because they distribute the same IP address across multiple users, reducing individual costs.
Shared proxy benchmark methodology
We run separate benchmark tests for residential, datacenter, and mobile proxy types, each targeting the platforms and use cases most relevant to that proxy category.
Residential proxies are tested against Amazon, Bing, eBay, and YouTube, common scraping targets where residential IPs are typically deployed. A new test cycle runs every 5 minutes, producing 288 cycles per day across 10 vendors. At that frequency, the residential benchmark generates approximately 2,880 requests per day and 86,400 requests per 30-day period.
Datacenter proxies are tested against a broader set of target types: search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex), e-commerce product pages (Amazon, eBay, Walmart), and social platforms (Instagram, X). All vendors are hit concurrently every 15 minutes with identical HTTP/2 settings, 10-second connection timeouts, 20-second total timeouts, desktop user agents, and randomized target URLs. We evaluated 5 providers across 15,000 total requests.
Mobile proxies follow the same validation logic as the other categories and were tested with 18,000 requests across the top providers.
What counts as a successful request: A request is marked successful only if it returns an HTTP status code between 200 and 399, the page contains the expected HTML elements for that target, and the response size is non-trivial with no CAPTCHA or “unusual traffic” block present. A timeout, an empty page, a CAPTCHA response, or any error counts as a failure.
What we measure: Success rate is the percentage of total requests that passed both the status check and content validation. Response time is the average time from the start of the request to the final byte received, calculated only for successful requests. Daily results are rolled up into these two metrics, with p50 and p95 views available for latency variability.
FAQs
A fully shared proxy is distributed across an open pool of users. A semi-dedicated proxy is shared with a fixed small group, Webshare caps at two users per IP, Rayobyte at three. The cost is higher than fully shared, the block risk is lower, and the performance sits between fully shared and fully dedicated. It’s worth considering as an intermediate step before moving to dedicated pricing.
Datacenter proxies come from IP ranges that anti-bot systems recognize as non-residential, they’re faster and cheaper but more detectable. Residential proxies route through real home ISPs and are harder to flag as proxy traffic.
In our benchmark, this distinction matters most for detection resistance: in raw success rate terms, shared residential providers all cluster in the same 40–60% band regardless of provider, which means the residential premium is paying for IP type rather than dramatically better outcomes across the board.
Cite this research
Pick the format that matches where you're publishing. Pasting the link version into your CMS preserves the backlink.
@misc{karatas2026,
author = {Karatas, Gulbahar},
title = {{Top Cheap Shared Proxies: Benchmark Results & Providers Compared}},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
howpublished = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/shared-proxy}},
note = {AIMultiple. Retrieved June 26, 2026}
}
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