In the early days of the internet, proxy services were vital privacy tools that you could use to hide your identity by spoofing your location. Those days are gone, however, as today’s proxy services are no longer made solely for privacy protection while web browsing, in part because VPNs have taken over that job.

Today's modern proxy services are aimed at businesses and developers, rather than individuals looking to improve their personal privacy. Instead of using a proxy service to spoof your location while streaming videos online (something many proxies outright block today), you'd use proxy services to scrape web data to feed into an LLM, to do market research on the competition, or test a product or service you're building from different geographic locations. In some ways, they're a kind of network for hire you can use to simulate a global customer base (and potentially get around location restrictions or protective services like Cloudflare or DDOS-Guard).

However, some consumer-level features are still present. For example, some proxy services can help you change your IP address so you can access a sneaker drop or GPU launch, or snag a cheaper flight in a different region than yours.

Whatever your reason for using a proxy, you'll want to make sure you're using a reliable service that does what it promises, and that isn't siphoning your data and selling it to the highest bidder. That's where we come in.

Our Testing Criteria for Proxy Services

When evaluating a proxy service, we examine the following:

• The types of servers available and how they are sourced.
• How easy it is to sign up and use the service.
• Whether the company offers a wide variety of services compared with its competition.
• The types of customer support available and the responsiveness of that support.
• The company's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents.
• Statements from the companies about server sourcing, and its data collection and retention policies.

Our reviews team tests proxy services for their effectiveness at changing your company’s real IP address, whether they offer a variety of residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies, their pricing structures, and the tools each service offers for all businesses, big and small. 

Pricing and Plans

When we compare prices among proxies, we state the lowest and highest prices for each type of proxy service. While nearly all proxy services offer a discount when you sign up for a long-term subscription, our goal is to highlight proxy services with flexible yet easy-to-understand pricing structures.

It's far better to try out a proxy for a month, or even just a few gigabytes of traffic, and decide later to spring for a longer-term or bigger-bandwidth discounted plan when you're sure you want to stick with the service. Consider the extra money you spend up front as a down payment against buyer's remorse.

Additional Features

While proxy services have decreased in popularity for individual users, partially due to the growth of VPNs for consumer needs, they've exploded in popularity for businesses, AI developers, and tech startups looking for cheap ways to test and deploy web services. For example, IPRoyal and MarsProxies both offer proxy services specifically for people who are buying sneakers, or who want to build tools to track the prices and availability of high-demand products (like graphics cards and gaming consoles).

Each review notes significant features available from a proxy service and who would most benefit from using them. These features usually include unlimited web traffic, mobile proxy availability, or ultra-fast IPv6 datacenter proxies.

Servers and Protocols

A key differentiator among proxy services is server distribution. If a proxy company offers no servers where you wish to spoof your location, it won't be very useful. We refer to the server locations and how widespread they are as "geographic diversity." We generally prefer services with many servers in many different parts of the world. It's particularly important to frequent travelers and users overseas since a proxy server closer to your computer will likely mean a faster and more reliable connection. For users in the US, more proxy server locations mean more opportunities to spoof your location.

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We do not test every connection in every location to ensure it is functional, although we do spot check. This is one of those cases in which we must assume companies are telling us the truth about their products. However, we investigate if we find a server that's unavailable during testing.

Most proxy services offer servers in Asia (sometimes excluding China, as explained below), Australia, Canada, the US, and Western Europe. Better services include servers in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Southeast Asia. 

Our reviews include a current count of the number of servers provided by the company in question and the number of IP addresses the company makes available. 

(Credit: Getty Images/Andriy Onufriyenko)

There are multiple ways to create a proxy connection, but not all protocols are equal. Most services offer proxies over the HTTP, HTTPS, or SOCKS5 protocols, but we'll note others that lack these offerings.

User Experience

While reviewing proxies, we describe the setup process for each service. We also poke around settings menus and see how easy it is to perform certain functions. It's important to us that you understand what using a given product will be like from our reviews.

(Credit: IPRoyal)

The setup and initialization process for a proxy can be incredibly simple when the company offers a mobile or desktop application and browser extensions for popular options such as Chrome or Firefox. However, it can be more arduous and complicated when the only choice is a manual setup performed through your browser settings or your device's internal proxy routing configuration. 

Sometimes, an excellent user experience makes a mediocre product better. Conversely, a poor user experience undercuts the value of an otherwise stellar product. In general, we emphasize ease of use and accessibility to users with all levels of experience. At the same time, we cannot deny the importance of technical excellence, especially when it's combined with value.

Trust and Privacy

When its product is active, a proxy has the same insight into your online activities as your ISP. It's crucial that you trust the service you sign up for and are comfortable with the potential pitfalls of using a proxy.

When we review a proxy service, we read its privacy policy and terms of service agreements. In particular, we look for what information a company gathers about its customers and their behavior, how it protects user information, and how it responds to requests for information from local and global governments or law enforcement. Proxy services, like many products, often trade in both user subscriptions and user data, and we want you to understand exactly what information you give up when you sign up.

The Evolution of Proxy Testing

As always at PCMag, we will adapt and improve our testing and update our reviews as products change and the landscape around them evolves. Perhaps a new technology will completely upend what makes a proxy service worthy. Whatever the case, the proxy reviews you read here will always be as accurate and helpful as we can make them.

For more on proxies, check out What is a Proxy and Do You Need One? and VPN vs. Proxy What's the Difference?