Pros & Cons
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- Free
- Affordable paid options
- Chrome browser extension
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- Inflexible pricing plans
- Limited location targeting choices
- No sticky sessions for residential proxies
Webshare Specs
| # of Residential IP Locations | 195 |
| # of Residential IPs | 300000000 |
| Browser Extension | |
| Free Trial | |
| Protocols Supported | HTTP |
| Protocols Supported | SOCKS5 |
| Support Types | Email, live chat, support website |
Webshare is a proxy service provider with plans best suited to small businesses. Right out of the gate, the company offers something we haven’t seen from others we’ve reviewed: free proxies. It’s not a gimmick or a scam; we tested the proxies, and they functioned as promised, which is fantastic. That said, while the company’s plans are affordable, the pricing structure isn’t quite as flexible as those we’ve seen from competitors. Webshare’s Chrome extension is excellent, but it is one of only a few extra features the company offers. Overall, Webshare is a solid choice, but we recommend Editors’ Choice winners Decodo for its diverse and user-friendly add-ons, and Soax for its business-friendly pricing structure.
How Much Does Webshare Cost?
Similar to IPRoyal, MarsProxies, and NetNut, Webshare’s services are primarily for individual consumers and small business owners. While some competitors offer free services for a limited trial period, Webshare’s offer is unique: 10 datacenter proxies and up to 1 gigabyte of data per month for free, forever.
The free proxies support HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols, and they’re shared, so some sites may block them if you’re using the proxies for web scraping. The forever free proxies plan is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with Webshare’s dashboard and tools while you decide how much data and what types of proxies your business requires. I’d love to see more proxy service companies offer a totally free service tier so that people can learn how to use the products before making purchases.
Speaking of learning opportunities, Webshare also offers free web scraping tutorials via the company’s Web Scraping Academy. The courses teach you how to use your proxies with popular software like Playwright, Puppeteer, and Selenium.
All said, Webshare’s affordability makes the service worth checking out. Webshare accepts payments using major credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Below is a description of each proxy service WebShare offers, followed by the prices.
Datacenter Proxies
Webshare’s datacenter proxy pool is one of the largest for a consumer or small business-level proxy service. The company has more than 400,000 datacenter proxies in more than 50 countries. Webshare recommends these proxies for activities like price tracking, search engine optimization monitoring, and web scraping.
You can choose from dedicated, private, or shared datacenter proxies. Dedicated proxies are proxies that are assigned to you alone, so they have a low chance of being blocked by websites. Private proxies are shared with 2 users at most, while shared proxies are split between multiple users and have a higher chance of being blocked by websites.
Webshare’s prices are pretty affordable. I mentioned the 10 free datacenter proxies already, and you can buy up to 100 proxies for $2.99 monthly, with per-proxy pricing going all the way up to 60,000 proxies for $1,794 per month. You can save even more money by signing up for an annual plan.
Static Residential Proxies
Webshare offers static residential proxies, which are also known as ISP proxies. The proxies come straight from providers like AT&T, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Sprint, so the proxy traffic appears to be authentic, much like a residential proxy, but the connection is as reliable as one you’d get with a datacenter proxy. Webshare recommends using these types of proxies with fraud detection software, or for tasks like managing multiple social media accounts.
Like Webshare’s datacenter proxies, you can choose from dedicated, private, and shared static residential proxies, which have varying data limits. The lowest-priced plan for this proxy type is $6 per month for 20 proxies. That price goes all the way up to $2,250 per month for 10,000 proxies. Discounted annual pricing is available for this tier, too.
Rotating Residential Proxies
Webshare offers more than 30 million rotating residential IP addresses in 195 locations, which is respectable, but still fewer than NetNut’s 80 million residential IPs. On the company’s website, it recommends using residential proxies to imitate organic user behavior to bypass web scraping challenges like IP blocks and geo-restrictions.
Unlike the other Webshare proxy types, residential plan prices are calculated by data usage. The lowest-priced plan starts at $7 per month for up to 1 gigabyte of data, and the most expensive plan is $8,400 per month for up to 3,000 gigabytes of data. Discounted annual pricing is available for residential plans.
Webshare’s Proxies
While Webshare’s free proxies set it apart from the competition in a positive way, there’s still some room to add diversity to its product list. For example, NetNut offers customers access to five million 3G/4G/5G and LTE mobile proxies. Webshare does not offer mobile proxies at all.
MarsProxies offers IPv4 and IPv6 proxies, while all of Webshare’s proxies are IPv4. IPRoyal has mobile and residential proxies that support HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 protocols. Webshare’s proxies only support HTTP and SOCKS5 connections.
There are some other things you should know about Webshare before signing up for the service, and I will go into detail about them below. If you’re skimming and want a quick TL;DR: I think the service is good. I just noticed some differences between Webshare and competitors such as IPRoyal, MarsProxies, NetNut, and Soax that may be surprising if you’ve used a different service in the past.
Limited Location Choices
With Webshare’s proxies, you’re not going to get many location targeting options. While testing the datacenter proxies, I was limited to country-level targeting. Though I did not test the static residential proxies, I noted that country-level locations are the limit in that category, too.
Bulk Pricing’s Big Drawback
There are also downsides to Webshare’s ultra-low, bulk pricing model. Here’s a scenario: You’re performing tasks like market research or website comparison, and you only need one dedicated residential proxy for a short time and a small amount of data. If you were using IPRoyal or MarsProxies, you’d choose the company’s pay-as-you-go options, pay less than $5 per gigabyte to use a residential proxy or two, and call it a day.
Webshare’s Rotating Residential Proxies do not support sticky sessions because they're, well, rotating. The company also doesn’t offer pay-as-you-go options. This means that people who only need to use a dedicated residential proxy a few times a year will need to pay for Webshare’s Static Residential Proxies each time. These proxies are only available at bulk prices, so if you buy the smallest amount, you’ll still pay for 20 proxies and 250GB of bandwidth, which comes out to a cool $42.
Yes, you’ll pay far less than you’d pay with competitors, but that’s only a good value if you’re using all that bandwidth. If you only need a proxy a few times a year for a short time, you’ll need to fork over a lot of money each time, which isn’t ideal.
I’d like to see more flexible and customizable pricing options from Webshare in the future. Soax’s pricing plan structure is the best I’ve encountered among services aimed at consumers and small businesses. The company has just four pricing levels for all proxy types, and the cost is based on data usage, not the number of proxies. All of Soax’s proxy types are available to buy at the pay-as-you-go level, too, so customers can scale up their data needs to meet the business demands.
Data Limits
You’ve probably noticed by now, but I haven’t mentioned data limits when talking about Webshare’s pricing. That’s because all of the plans follow the company’s bandwidth limit policy. It’s not very straightforward, but as I understand it, your available bandwidth increases based on the number of proxies you buy. For example, if you purchase 1,000 shared proxies, you get unlimited bandwidth, while you only need to buy 75 dedicated datacenter proxies for unlimited bandwidth to kick in.
(Credit: Webshare)As anyone who’s challenged the rules of an all-you-can-eat buffet knows, “unlimited” is usually just a marketing term. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that Webshare’s unlimited data does have limits. All plans are subject to the company’s fair usage policy, which says the company will temporarily throttle a customer’s bandwidth if their data usage is more than expected for the number of proxies they’ve purchased. Each unlimited data plan is guaranteed 10 terabytes of data before throttling, so unless you’re trying to use a lot of data all at once, you probably won’t violate the policy.
Connection Options
Now let’s talk about Webshare’s three proxy connection methods: Backbone, Direct, and Rotating. A Direct connection uses your assigned IP address as the proxy address. It’s best for tasks that require you to use the same IP address over and over, like social media profile management.
If you choose to use Rotating connections, Webshare automatically shuffles the proxies in your list and rotates your connection without your input. This is a good option for any tasks that require a lot of anonymity, like web scraping or monitoring websites, but the proxies are a bit slower than those established via Direct connections.
The Backbone connection lets you connect to a stable proxy address while simultaneously rotating through your IP list. This is a helpful connection setting for people who need to maintain a stable connection but also require anonymity. A Backbone connection is helpful when scraping data from large, well-protected websites, but it’s also the slowest of the three connection options.
Reviews From Current Customers
Webshare has 4.3 out of 5 stars on customer review site TrustPilot. The score is a little lower than similar companies like IPRoyal (4.6), MarsProxies (4.7), and NetNut (4.7). Recent reviews praise the professionalism of the customer service team and the efficacy of service, while most of the complaints were about account suspensions and refunds.
(Credit: TrustPilot/PCMag)Like other sites that rely on community-generated content, TrustPilot’s scores and testimonies can be manipulated. The website uses fraud detection and monitoring measures to identify inauthentic reviews. Webshare’s reviews on TrustPilot appear to be real, and the company frequently responds to negative reviews in a polite and professional manner, which is ideal.
Customer Support Options
Need help? You can get help with Webshare’s services by booking a call with a support team member, sending your dedicated support team member a live chat message via the dashboard, or sending an email. To troubleshoot issues on your own, check out the company’s help center.
Should You Trust Webshare?
Proxy services are not typically marketed as online privacy or safety products, so I don’t hold them to the standards I’d expect from privacy-first tools, like VPNs. That said, it’s a good idea to remember that a proxy provider can still see some of your online traffic, so you still need to trust a company with that data. That’s why I recommend finding out what kinds of personal information a company collects about customers while the proxy connection is active, and how long it keeps that information. It’s also a good idea to learn what companies are doing with the data you give them when you sign up to use a service.
The next portion of this review is about the kinds of data Webshare collects from customers, as outlined in the company’s privacy policy. I also examined the company’s refund and terms of use policies, and I’ll provide brief overviews of each document.
Privacy Policy Analysis
Webshare’s privacy policy is fairly straightforward and easy to read. In it, the company states that it retains any information you provide when registering for an account, and other data like your email address, IP address, and payment information. This kind of data collection is pretty normal and doesn’t veer into excessive territory. Webshare also explains how the company uses customer data in the privacy policy, which is ideal.
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(Credit: Webshare)Webshare is located in Walnut, California, so its data collection policies align with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is one of the strongest data protection policies in the United States. The policy warns customers that their data may be maintained on, or transferred to, computers that are in the United States, which may have different data protection laws than the customers’ home country. If you’re a California resident or live in the European Economic Area (EEA), you can ask Webshare to delete your data by submitting an emailed request.
Terms of Service Agreement
Webshare’s terms of service document is pretty easy to read and states that the company can terminate your account for any reason, at any time. The agreement specifies the activities that can earn you a ban on the platform, including uploading malware, transmitting spam, using proxies for fraud or impersonation scams, and using the proxies to attempt security breaches. specifies the ways in which you can earn a service suspension or ban.
Can You Get a Refund From Webshare?
Yes, Webshare offers refunds, but only in specific circumstances. In the terms of service agreement, Webshare states that you’re eligible for a refund if you cancel your subscription within two days, you used less than one gigabyte of data, and you used fewer than 1000 proxies. You can check your data usage with Webshare’s dashboard.
Interview With Webshare
While analyzing a company’s privacy and terms of service policies, I send companies a list of questions to inquire about their proxy acquisition methods. The answers are important from both an ethical and a safety standpoint. For example, some proxy providers use third-party botnets for their remote IPs, so when you use a residential proxy, the IP could belong to a stranger who is totally unaware that they’re sharing bandwidth with you.
Like Bright Data, Decodo, IPRoyal, Oxylabs, and NetNut, Webshare gets residential IP addresses from people who are using bandwidth-sharing apps. Webshare did not disclose the names of the apps used to obtain consent, but you can read more about the endpoint consent policy here. Below are Webshare’s answers to my questions about proxy sourcing and personal data collection practices.
How does Webshare obtain residential proxies?
All Webshare Residential proxies come from:
● Physical user devices. Consenting and fully aware individuals become a part of a residential proxy network in return for a financial reward or some other benefit.
● Internet Service Providers (ISP). Less sensitive alternative to residential proxy acquisition, as ISP residential proxies do not require the end-user participation.
All of Webshare’s non-ISP residential proxies are carefully handpicked and sourced from a premium grade-A model network.
For residential proxies, does Webshare use active and informed consent for endpoints?
Yes, Webshare does use active and informed consent for residential proxy endpoints which ensure that:
● Users are explicitly informed about the usage of their devices
● They give clear consent
● Participation is typically rewarded;
● Their sourcing methods meet Tier A ethical standards
Webshare has also established a grading system for residential proxy providers based on ethical sourcing and consent. Webshare’s network is composed of Tier A proxies, which include: Financial rewards, clear information, end‑user awareness, and explicit user consent
Does Webshare own its datacenter proxies, or does the company use a third-party service to host them?
We use a combination of third-party resources along with a smaller pool owned by us for datacenter proxies. For third-party sourcing, we carefully select vendors with an aim to consistently be as close to the direct supplier as possible, ensuring smoother operations and prevention of common supply occurrences.
Does Webshare collect customer data?
Yes, Webshare collects several different types of information for various purposes to provide and improve our services.
1. General Personal Information (Email address, First name and last name, IP Address and other online identifiers, Cookies and Usage Data, Billing and payment information (such as credit card numbers, and payment history), Content of your communication messages when you interact with us)
2. Information You Provide To Us Directly (Registration Information, Inquiry Information)
3. Tracking and Cookies Data (Log File Data, Analytics Data, Location Data)
4. Personal Information Collected from Other Sources and Third Parties (Identity Verification, Payment Processors, Referrals, Single Sign-On)
Where is data stored? How long does Webshare store user data?
Collected data is stored in the EU and the US, with conditions according to the local law and the type of data being stored.
Hands On With Webshare
Here at PCMag, we like to highlight consumer-friendly services whenever possible. A company really can’t get more wallet-friendly or consumer-focused than offering proxies for free, so that’s why Webshare’s free datacenter proxies are the focus of the testing portion of this review.
(Credit: Webshare/PCMag)After signing up for an account, the Webshare dashboard opened automatically. You can buy new plans or manage your proxies using the dashboard. If you’re using the Free plan, click on the section labeled Proxy List and choose which countries you want to target. Free customers can choose proxy locations in Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The number of available datacenter proxies in locations outside of the United States was pretty low, as you can see in the screenshot below.
(Credit: Webshare/PCMag)I downloaded Webshare’s handy browser extension for Google Chrome. After installing it, I was immediately logged in and ready to connect to a proxy.
Location Spoofing Test Results
I was able to connect to proxies in Spain and the United Kingdom without any problems. As you can see in the screenshots from Browserleaks below, I successfully spoofed my IP address using Webshare and changed my location from my home in the United States to Spain.
(Credit: Browserleaks/PCMag)