5 ProxyEmpire Alternatives Worth Testing in 2026
ProxyEmpire isn't a bad service. It's got rollover data, 170+ country targeting, and a clean enough IP pool. The problem is evaluating it independently - ProxyEmpire has 4 reviews on G2, all 5 stars, which tells you almost nothing. Compare that to Decodo's 544 reviews or IPRoyal's 631. With roughly 250 companies competing in the proxy market, you shouldn't have to take a 4-review sample on faith.
ProxyEmpire's rotating residential pricing starts at $3.50/GB on small tiers and drops to around $1.50/GB at 1TB. The most common reasons people start looking elsewhere: cost at scale, inconsistent success rates on Cloudflare-protected targets, and the need for a larger IP pool. Here are five options that address those pain points directly.
Our Picks at a Glance
- Best overall value: Decodo - Proxyway Value Choice 2025, $2-$3.75/GB residential, 99.86% success rate in community benchmarks.
- Best for enterprise: Oxylabs - Proxyway Best Enterprise Provider 2025, 175M+ IPs, 99%+ success rates under heavy load.
- Best if your real goal is B2B contact data: Prospeo - skip proxies entirely and get verified emails at ~$0.01 each (see data enrichment options).
Quick Comparison
| Provider | IP Pool | Residential $/GB | Trial | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ProxyEmpire | 30M+ | $3.50 - ~$1.50 (1TB) | $1.97 paid trial (100MB) | Mid-market baseline |
| Decodo | 115M+ | $2.00-$3.75 | 3-day, 100MB free | Value + performance |
| Oxylabs | 175M+ | $4.00 | 3-7 days (varies) | Enterprise scale |
| SOAX | 155M+ residential | $3.60 starter | $1.99 / 400MB | Multi-type flexibility |
| IPRoyal | ~34M+ | $4.90-$7.00 | None | Non-expiring traffic |
You're comparing proxy providers at $2-$7/GB to scrape contact data that still needs verification. Prospeo gives you 300M+ profiles with 98% email accuracy and 125M+ verified mobiles - no proxies, no scrapers, no bounce risk. At ~$0.01/email, one month of proxy bandwidth buys a year of verified results.
Replace your entire scraping stack with one search.
The Best ProxyEmpire Alternatives
Decodo
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) won Proxyway's Value Choice 2025 award, and the pricing backs it up. Residential plans start at $3.75/GB for 3GB and drop to $2.00/GB at the 1TB tier on subscription plans - pay-as-you-go rates run higher. CNET named it their pick for smaller businesses, and the community agrees: a Reddit user who spent $500 benchmarking residential proxies reported a 99.86% success rate at 0.63s average response time across 1,000 requests on protected targets.
The IP pool sits between 55M and 115M+ depending on which page you check - either way, that's serious IP diversity with country, city, and ZIP-level targeting. We've found the free 3-day trial with 100MB is enough to validate success rates on your target sites before committing. Best for teams that want top-tier residential performance without enterprise pricing. Skip Decodo if you need dedicated account management or 175M+ IP diversity - that's Oxylabs territory.
If you're comparing providers mainly to support web scraping lead generation, Decodo is usually the first one to benchmark.
Oxylabs
If your monthly bandwidth is under 50GB, skip to the next option. You'll overpay for enterprise overhead you don't need.
Still here? Oxylabs took the Best Enterprise Provider 2025 award, and it earned it. The pool runs 175M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries, and AIMultiple's benchmarks show consistent 99%+ success rates under load testing with 100,000 parallel requests. Residential pricing starts at $4.00/GB - a dollar or more per GB above Decodo at comparable volumes - but you're paying for infrastructure depth, dedicated support, and SLAs that actually mean something.
Trials run 3 days for individuals and 7 days for companies. If you're running scraping operations that touch hundreds of thousands of pages daily and need guaranteed uptime with a named support contact, this is the provider. For everyone else, the premium isn't justified.
If your end goal is building outbound lists, you may be better off with a sales prospecting database than scaling proxy spend.
SOAX
Most proxy providers force you into separate plans for residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies. SOAX's unified credit model covers all four types plus their Web Data API under one subscription. That alone makes it worth a look if you're juggling multiple proxy needs.
SOAX earned the Contender of the Year 2025 award. Residential starts at $3.60/GB on the Starter plan (25GB/$90/mo), and they're one of the few providers supporting UDP and QUIC protocols alongside HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. The $1.99 trial gives you 3 days and 400MB - the cheapest way to test a serious provider. But let's be honest: if you only need residential proxies and want the absolute lowest per-GB cost, Decodo wins that fight.
If you're using proxies to power an email crawler, SOAX’s multi-type flexibility can simplify your stack.
IPRoyal
IPRoyal's draw is simple: non-expiring traffic. Buy bandwidth and use it whenever you want, no monthly reset. Residential runs $7.00/GB for 1GB down to $4.90/GB at 50GB, which is pricier per GB than Decodo or SOAX. But 631 G2 reviews at 4.7/5 give it the strongest community validation on this list, and for teams with sporadic, unpredictable usage patterns, the no-expiry model can save real money compared to burning unused monthly bandwidth.
If deliverability is the real risk you're trying to avoid, focus on email bounce rate and list hygiene - not just IP rotation.
Prospeo
Here's the thing: if you're paying for proxy bandwidth to scrape B2B emails and phone numbers, you're solving the wrong problem.
We've watched teams spend months building scraping pipelines - rotating residential IPs, parsing HTML, deduplicating results, running email verification on whatever they scraped - only to end up with 70-80% accuracy and burned domains. Prospeo eliminates that entire stack. The platform covers 300M+ professional profiles with 98% email accuracy and 125M+ verified mobile numbers, all on a 7-day data refresh cycle. Search by 30+ filters including buyer intent, technographics, and job changes, then push contacts directly to Salesforce, HubSpot, Lemlist, or Instantly.
Pricing works out to roughly $0.01 per email. The free tier includes 75 verified emails and 100 Chrome extension credits per month, no credit card required. Use this if your proxy spend is ultimately about getting B2B contact data - it replaces proxies, scrapers, and verification tools with one platform.
If you still want to compare approaches, start with lead enrichment and then decide whether scraping is even necessary.
Teams burning $500+/month on residential proxies to build lead lists end up with 70-80% accuracy and burned domains. Prospeo delivers verified emails on a 7-day refresh cycle with 30+ filters - buyer intent, technographics, job changes - and pushes contacts straight to your CRM or sequencer.
Stop paying per GB when you can pay per verified contact.
How to Pick the Right One
Most teams shopping for ProxyEmpire competitors don't actually need a bigger proxy provider. They need to match the tool to the job.
Scraping at scale on a budget? Decodo. Best value per GB with top-tier success rates. Enterprise reliability and named support? Oxylabs. Largest pool, strongest SLAs. Multiple proxy types under one plan? SOAX. Unified credits across residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter. Sporadic usage with no monthly pressure? IPRoyal. Non-expiring bandwidth means you never waste what you buy. B2B prospecting data? Don't pay for proxies when you can pay for verified results (see sales prospecting techniques).
One name you won't find on this list: Bright Data. They withdrew from the 2025 industry benchmarks at the last moment, and Proxyway only included them as a shadow participant using 2024 data - which makes independent evaluation harder right now. Worth watching, but we can't recommend what we can't verify.
FAQ
Is ProxyEmpire legit?
Yes. It's a functional proxy provider with residential, mobile, and datacenter offerings across 170+ countries. The challenge is independent validation - only 4 G2 reviews exist compared to 400-600+ for alternatives like Decodo, IPRoyal, and Oxylabs. Not a scam, but the thin review footprint makes confident evaluation difficult.
What's the cheapest alternative?
Decodo at $2.00/GB on the 1TB tier, or $3.75/GB for small 3GB plans. IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic model can also save money if your usage is sporadic rather than monthly. For B2B data specifically, Prospeo at ~$0.01 per verified email undercuts any proxy-based scraping workflow by a wide margin.
Do any alternatives offer free trials?
Decodo offers a 3-day free trial with 100MB of bandwidth. SOAX has a $1.99 trial for 3 days and 400MB. Oxylabs provides 3-day trials for individuals and 7-day trials for companies. Prospeo's free tier gives you 75 emails per month with no credit card and no expiration.
