"Which proxy should I buy?" is the question we get most. The honest answer: it depends on how hard the website you're visiting looks at its visitors, how fast you need to go, and whether you need the same IP for a long time. Here's how the options compare.
The short version
| If you need to... | Use |
|---|---|
| Scrape sites with serious anti-bot protection | Residential |
| Do the same on a tighter budget | Residential Budget |
| Manage social or app accounts, the most trusted IPs | Mobile (4G/5G) |
| Keep one IP for weeks at datacenter speed | Dedicated ISP |
| Move lots of data fast where blocking is light | Datacenter or Shared ISP |
| Hit IPv6-ready targets with a huge address pool | IPv6 Residential or IPv6 Datacenter |
| Run heavy traffic without counting gigabytes | Unlimited Residential |
The rest of this guide explains why.
Residential
Residential proxies route your traffic through real home internet connections: the same broadband IPs ordinary people browse from. To a website, a request looks like it came from someone's living room.
- Trust: high. Sites can't block home IP ranges wholesale without blocking real customers.
- Speed: good, and it varies a little because every exit is a real connection.
- Targeting: country, US state and city, rotating or sticky.
- Billing: per GB.
- Gateway:
geo.crawlproxies.com, HTTP 8080 / SOCKS5 1080.
Pick Residential when a site blocks datacenter IPs, shows CAPTCHAs, or serves different content to "real" visitors. That covers most e-commerce, travel, search and social sites.
Residential Budget is a lower-cost residential pool on budget.crawlproxies.com (HTTP 6969 / SOCKS5 9696). It has no location targeting: exits come from the whole worldwide pool, rotating or sticky. It's a great fit for high-volume scraping where cost per GB matters more than picking the exit country or squeezing out the last bit of success rate.
Mobile (4G/5G)
Mobile proxies use IPs from cellular carriers. Carriers put many phones behind each public IP, so one mobile IP is shared by lots of real users at the same time. Websites know that blocking it would lock out everyone on it, so mobile IPs are the most trusted of all.
- Trust: highest.
- Best for: social media, app APIs, account management, anything that's strict about new accounts.
- Targeting: country, US state and city, rotating or sticky.
- Billing: per GB, on the same gateway as Residential (
geo.crawlproxies.com).
Mobile USA is a US-only mobile pool on its own gateway, for when you specifically need American carrier IPs.
ISP (static residential)
ISP proxies are IPs registered to consumer internet providers but hosted in data centres. You get datacenter speed and stability with an address that looks residential.
- Shared ISP (
isp.crawlproxies.com) and ISP Europe (eu-isp.crawlproxies.com) are pools with country targeting and sticky sessions, billed per GB or by bandwidth and days. - Dedicated ISP gives you your own static IPs: each proxy line is one IP that's yours for the whole plan, billed per IP.
Pick ISP when you need a fast, stable identity: long-lived accounts, sneaker and ticket sites, anything where your IP should stay the same for days or weeks.
Datacenter
Datacenter proxies come from cloud and hosting providers. They're the fastest and cheapest per gigabyte, but their IP ranges are public knowledge, so strict sites spot them easily.
- Trust: lowest; fine for many sites, blocked by the strictest.
- Speed: highest.
- Targeting: country, rotating or sticky.
- Gateway:
dc.crawlproxies.com, HTTP 777 / SOCKS5 666.
Pick Datacenter for APIs, sites without heavy bot protection, bulk downloads, and testing your setup before you spend residential bandwidth.
IPv6
IPv6 Residential and IPv6 Datacenter give you a practically endless supply of addresses. The catch: they only work with websites that are reachable over IPv6. Many big sites are, but plenty aren't. Check your targets first: if a site has no IPv6 address, these proxies can't reach it.
Unlimited Residential
Instead of paying per gigabyte, Unlimited Residential is billed by server capacity and time. If your workload moves a lot of data (media, large pages, constant monitoring), it can work out far cheaper than per-GB plans. Premium Unlimited Residential adds city targeting and its own dedicated hostname per plan.
How to decide
- Start with what the site allows. Try Datacenter first if you're unsure: if it works, it's the fastest and cheapest. If you get blocked, move to Residential.
- Need the same IP for a long time? Use sticky sessions for minutes to hours, or Dedicated ISP for days to weeks.
- Working with accounts? Mobile or Residential with sticky sessions, one session per account.
- Moving lots of data? Compare per-GB pricing with Unlimited Residential on the pricing page.
Not sure yet? Create an account, grab a plan, and run your real workload on a small amount first. It's the only benchmark that really counts. The getting started guide gets you connected in five minutes.
