We compare ourselves to major proxy providers on price, pool size, geo coverage, and features. No marketing speak - just the actual differences.
SotaProxy vs Bright Data
Bright Data leads in enterprise tooling and pool size. SotaProxy wins on price and simplicity for teams that need straightforward proxy access without the overhead.
SotaProxy vs Smartproxy
Both providers offer rotating residential proxies with global coverage. The key differences are in pricing model, payment options, and minimum commitments.
SotaProxy vs Oxylabs
Oxylabs targets enterprise scraping teams with managed APIs. SotaProxy targets developers and businesses that want direct proxy access at lower cost.
SotaProxy vs IPRoyal
Both providers offer residential, datacenter, and ISP proxies with pay-as-you-go pricing. Here is how they compare on the metrics that matter.
SotaProxy vs Webshare
Webshare competes on cheap datacenter IPs. SotaProxy offers a broader product range including mobile proxies and better residential pool quality.
Every provider’s site says the same four things: a large pool, high uptime, fast support, fair prices. None of that separates them, because none of it can be checked from outside. What separates them is duller: where the pool came from, which unit you are billed in, how long you may hold one address, and what happens when a job does not work out. This page collects our comparisons and says what to watch for while reading them, including the part where we are an interested party.
Four things that actually differ
Everything else either matches or cannot be verified.
- Where the pool came from. An own network, resold capacity, or traffic gathered through modules embedded in apps. That decides both stability and how knowingly people gave up their connection. Almost nobody states it plainly.
- Which unit you are billed in. Gigabytes, an address per month, a port, a day. Two providers that look equally priced diverge threefold on the same job, because they are counting different things.
- How long one address lives. Rotation per request, a sticky session for minutes, static for the term. That is what decides whether an account survives the work, not the size of the pool.
- Where the floor is. Minimum top-up, a committed monthly volume, expiring traffic. A cheap per-gigabyte price often lives exactly until this point.
How to read a comparison written by one of the parties
We wrote these pages and we sell one of the two products being compared. So, three caveats.
Our numbers about ourselves are checkable: prices are on the pricing page and in machine-readable form at /pricing.txt, and the connection strings work exactly as written. Our descriptions of other products are a starting point rather than an audit.
We do not quote competitor prices. They change without notice, and a stale figure is worse than none. Instead we describe the structure: what you are charged for and where the surcharge starts.
Where a competitor suits a job better, the comparison says so. A comparison that never reaches that conclusion is advertising rather than comparison.
A five minute check that beats reading reviews
It is faster, and it answers your question rather than somebody else’s.
- Take one real target and a real volume. Not "a million requests", but the pages you actually need.
- Ask both for a trial and run the same script through each: same headers, same pace, same day.
- Count failures by type. A 403 is about address class, a 429 about pace, a timeout about the network. Only the first is about the provider’s pool.
- Compare the invoice rather than the price. Measure page weight yourself and multiply by the per-gigabyte rate: the difference in weight is often larger than the difference in tariff.
- Check the exit itself. Run ipinfo through it and see whether the country and the network match what you paid for.
Questions about these comparisons
Why do you publish comparisons with competitors?
Because people search for them, and without our page they would read only what the other side wrote. We would rather the comparison came with checkable numbers about us.
Why do you not list competitor prices?
They change without notice, and a stale figure misleads more than a missing one. We describe the tariff structure instead: what you are charged for and where the surcharge begins.
Which provider is best?
It depends on the unit you are billed in and how long you need one address. The five minute check above answers that faster than any review.
Are you cheaper than everyone?
No. We are cheap on per-gigabyte residential and on static addresses, and we have no committed monthly volume. At very large volumes the big providers negotiate below our list price.
Can your numbers be checked without buying?
Yes. Prices and limits are published machine-readable at /pricing.txt and /llms-full.txt, and the connection strings from the documentation work on a trial.