14 Residential Proxy Brands in 2026 — What Each One Actually Is

If you came here expecting a leaderboard ranking the “best residential proxy 2026,” you’re going to leave disappointed. The honest answer to “which brand is best” is none of them, on their own. Every serious operator we know runs a mix — usually 2 to 4 brands chained together — and rotates through them based on what their target is doing that week.

This post is a field guide to the 14 residential brand offerings we run on hellworld.io — what each pool actually is (the marketing copy is pretty thin), and how we see customers actually deploy them. Twelve of these are aggregated from public-supplier pools at group-buy unit economics; two are proprietary pools we operate ourselves (Goatx and F-Private). We pay the bills on all 14, so the conflict-of-interest disclosure is upfront: we make a margin when you buy. The reason we still write it this way is that the alternative — pretending one is universally best — gets us refund tickets when reality disagrees.

This piece is residential-only. If you’re looking for 4G Mobile (FP-Mobile / ET-Mobile / HD-Mobile), Static ISP (per-IP/month dedicated), or Unlimited (flat-rate ISP-USA / wireless-residential), there’s a brief tour of those at the end.

If you have 90 seconds, jump to the TL;DR table. If you’ve got coffee, keep reading.

TL;DR — Quick verdict

This is what we generally suggest as a starting point for residential workloads. None of these are absolute — the right answer depends on your specific target’s anti-bot stack, geo-targeting strictness, and budget tolerance. Use this as a starting hypothesis, then iterate.

Use case	Common starting point	Backup	Notes
General-purpose scraping, budget	Geofast ($0.23/GB)	F-Netnut	Default. Big pool, cheapest residential.
Scraping-first workload, cost-sensitive	F-Private ($1.43/GB)	Geofast	Proprietary pool tuned for scraping economics.
Multi-region targets, no geo headaches	Goatx ($1.58/GB)	F-Private	Proprietary auto-routing across multiple relay layers.
Cloudflare-heavy targets	Lumi ($3.68/GB)	F-Oxylab	Premium pools clear modern Turnstile more reliably than budget.
SERP scraping at scale	Smart ($3.16/GB)	F-Oxylab	Smart’s Google sticky-session logic is the most operationally simple.
Geo-strict targets (US-only sites etc.)	Iproyal ($1.47/GB)	F-Iproyal	Tends to geolocate cleanly across MaxMind/IP2Location.
ISP-grade trust at residential price	Netnut ($1.00/GB)	F-Netnut	ISP-blended peering, “static-residential” feel.
Mass account warming	Geonode ($0.84/GB)	Packetstream	$0.84/GB with the most “real residential” feel.
Premium fallback chain	F-Oxylab ($2.14/GB) → F-Lumi ($2.57/GB)	Oxylab	Pair them as a two-step retry chain on hard targets.

The rest of the post is the why behind those defaults — and a section on geo-locking, which is the thing most comparison posts skip and where most “this proxy doesn’t work” tickets actually come from.

Mix-and-match is the strategy

Here’s the part nobody says out loud: there’s no proxy brand that handles every target well. The pools are good at different things, and what’s “best” for a site shifts month-to-month as the anti-bot vendors push updates.

What works in production:

• Two pools chained. Cheap pool first (Geofast, F-Netnut). When a target starts blocking, fail over to a premium pool (Lumi, F-Oxylab) for the retried requests. Cuts your average $/GB by ~40-60% without giving up the ceiling on success rate.
• Type-mixed by phase. Rotating residential for product-page scraping. Sticky mobile or static ISP for the actual checkout / authenticated step. Same project, different proxy types per HTTP call.
• Brand-swap on the fly. When one upstream has a bad week (and they all do — supplier infra burps, abuse waves, IP retirement events), you flip to another. This is the actual reason we built hellworld.io the way we did: one wallet, hot-swap between 14 brands without re-onboarding.

If you’re thinking “but I just want to know which one to buy” — start with Geofast at $0.23/GB, route some traffic, see what fails, then graduate. The cheapest experiment is the one you actually run.

Geo-locking: the part that bites you

This is the section we keep linking customers to in support tickets. It’s also the thing that makes “which brand is best for site X” unanswerable as a single question.

A target site that’s “US-only” doesn’t mean it physically rejects packets from non-US IPs. It means the site’s geo-rule list flags non-US IPs based on some geolocation database. And the gotcha is that different databases disagree about where a given IP lives.

The major databases sites use:

• MaxMind GeoIP2 — the dominant one. Most large e-commerce stacks key off this.
• IP2Location — common in adtech, anti-fraud, and some sneaker sites.
• DB-IP — used by Cloudflare, some CDNs, and a handful of fraud vendors.
• Carrier-reported geo — for mobile IPs, the carrier’s own location signal sometimes overrides.

What happens in practice: an IP that MaxMind says is “US-CA-Los Angeles” may be tagged “GB” by IP2Location because the ASN has UK registration history. If your target site checks IP2Location, your “US” residential proxy gets rejected even though the dashboard claimed it was American.

How to debug it when it bites:

1. Take the IP your proxy gave you.
2. Check it on all four databases (most have free lookup pages — ipinfo.io, ip2location.com, maxmind.com/en/geoip-demo, db-ip.com).
3. If they disagree, your target probably uses the one that doesn’t favor you.
4. Pick a different brand (different pools have different ASN compositions and tend to look “cleaner” in different DBs).

Brands that consistently geolocate cleanly across all four databases in our experience: Iproyal, F-Iproyal, Lumi, F-Lumi. Brands that have more geo-disagreement: Packetstream (P2P pool with mixed origin), Geofast (huge pool, less curated). The proprietary Goatx auto-routes regions, so geo-claim is whatever the route layer reports — usually consistent at country level, sometimes drifty at city.

This is why “best brand for Nike SNKRS” is a moving target — Nike’s geo rules change, the databases shift, and the answer drifts.

The 14 Residential Brands, explained

These are the 14 residential pools we run. Six carry an F- prefix — that prefix denotes a different internal routing variant than the non-prefixed sibling, with its own latency profile, session-control granularity, and price. Performance varies by target, so test the variant that matches your unit economics rather than assuming the more expensive one is always better.

Two of the 14 are proprietary pools we operate ourselves — Goatx and F-Private. The other twelve are aggregated from public-supplier pool families at group-buy unit economics.

Geofast — Residential, $0.23/GB (proprietary house pool)

Our house residential pool. 95M+ IPs across 210 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. The price is the headline — at $0.23/GB it’s roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than retail residential. We run it as a loss-leader on top of bulk capacity contracts to onboard new customers cheaply. Pool is large but less curated than premium tiers, so geo-claim accuracy is “good enough” rather than tight. Default starting point for any new project. Browse residential plans.

Geonode — Residential, $0.84/GB

10M+ IPs across 476 cities in 140 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. The most “real residential” feeling pool in our cheap tier — pool composition leans toward genuine consumer SDK peers rather than ISP-blended infrastructure, which means IPs look more like a random home internet user. Latency is higher and pool is smaller than the F-prefixed residential lines, but for jobs where you specifically want to look like a residential customer (account warming, e-commerce browsing patterns), this is the most authentic feel per dollar.

F-Netnut — Residential, $1.00/GB

85M+ IPs, 140 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. One of the more ISP-blended pools on our board — peering happens at the ISP level rather than entirely through SDK-installed residential peers, so the IPs feel closer to “static residential” than pure peer-network pools at this price point. Latency is consistently good. Retail residential of this composition (NetNut-class ISP peering) typically runs $4-6/GB on the open market; $1.00/GB through us is the steepest discount on the table.

Netnut — Residential, $1.00/GB

Shares the underlying ISP-peered pool composition with F-Netnut but on a different internal routing variant — different session-control granularity and a slightly different latency profile. Same headline price; the choice is which routing variant works better against your specific target. Run a small A/B test before committing volume.

Packetstream — Residential P2P, $1.05/GB

The honest budget P2P option. Packetstream is a peer-to-peer network — end users share their bandwidth in exchange for crypto. 5M+ active peers, 136 countries, HTTP/s only. Trust scores run lower than ISP-blended pools and you’ll see geo-disagreement across databases more often (see the geo-locking section). Stable, price hasn’t moved in years, fine for low-risk targets like account warming.

F-Iproyal — Residential, $1.21/GB

32M+ IPs, 140 countries, HTTP/s only on this tier (no SOCKS). A smaller pool than the giants but unusually well-curated — burned IPs are aggressively pruned, and IPs tend to geolocate cleanly across MaxMind/IP2Location/DB-IP. If your job depends on the IP actually being where it claims to be (KYC, geo-fenced offers, ticketing in regulated regions), this is one of the safer picks per dollar.

F-Private — Residential, $1.43/GB (proprietary scraping pool)

A pool we deploy and operate ourselves, tuned for scraping unit economics rather than retail polish. 95M+ IPs across 140 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5, 2-hour sticky sessions. The deployment philosophy is lean infra cost, scraping-friendly behavior: shorter sticky windows, no enterprise-grade session-control bells and whistles, just a stable scraping pool at the right price. Where customers land here: long-running crawlers where per-GB cost dominates and per-request rotation flexibility doesn’t.

Iproyal — Residential, $1.47/GB

Shares the same underlying IP pool composition as F-Iproyal, but on a different routing variant — SOCKS5 support, faster session-creation API, and tighter session control. The 26-cent premium is for SOCKS and the lower-latency path. If your stack needs SOCKS, take this one; otherwise F-Iproyal.

Goatx — Residential (auto-routed), $1.58/GB (proprietary multi-relay pool)

The other proprietary pool we operate. Goatx isn’t a single pool — it’s a routing layer over multiple relay tiers, picking gateways across US / EU / Asia depending on what your target accepts. Pricing is global ($1.58–$2.14/GB depending on volume tier), HTTP/s. The design intent is adaptive: different target servers respond best to different relay-server profiles, and Goatx tries to learn which profile your traffic prefers. The flip side: you have to test and tune. Goatx is the brand we point customers to when they say “I’m running against a weird mix of targets and don’t want to micromanage gateway selection.” If you have one well-understood target, a brand-specific pool will probably outperform — but for messy multi-target deployments, Goatx’s auto-routing is usually a net win.

F-Oxylab — Residential, $2.14/GB

175M+ IPs across 140 countries, full HTTP/s + SOCKS5. One of the largest residential pools you can route through anywhere on any board. Anecdotally — based on customer success rates we see in our support traffic, not a controlled test — F-Oxylab is the brand customers retry to most often when a cheaper pool starts struggling on Cloudflare-heavy targets.

F-Lumi — Residential, $2.57/GB

150M+ IPs, 140 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. Highest-success-rate pool in our F- tier, with ASN-level targeting available. Same underlying pool composition as Lumi (the premium tier sibling) but on a different routing variant — slightly different latency and session profile, $1.11/GB cheaper. The brand customers run when the budget for Lumi isn’t there but the cheaper F-Oxylab isn’t quite getting through. Common chain pattern: F-Oxylab → F-Lumi as the second retry step on hard targets.

Smart — Residential, $3.16/GB

115M+ IPs, 140 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. Operationally Smart is the easiest brand on our board for SERP scraping — the Google sticky-session logic for paginated queries is the most robust we’ve seen, which matters when you’re crawling search at scale and don’t want to write your own session orchestration. For non-SERP work, F-Oxylab gets you similar success rates cheaper.

Oxylab — Residential, $3.16/GB

Same underlying pool composition as F-Oxylab on a lower-latency routing variant, with full direct-tier features — Web Unblocker / SERP API access, sub-account management. Pick this when “it has to work, period” beats “it has to be cheap.”

Lumi — Residential, $3.68/GB

150M+ IPs, 142 countries, HTTP/s + SOCKS5. The most polished session control in the lineup — per-request country, ASN, OS targeting all work cleanly. Premium-residential pricing of this caliber typically runs $8-15/GB on the open market (think Bright Data retail tiers); bulk commit lets us land it at $3.68/GB. Common chain pattern: cheap pool first, Lumi for the retried requests on hard targets.

Cheapest 5 (under $1.50/GB)

If your first constraint is budget:

• Geofast ($0.23/GB) — Default starting point. Big pool, hard to beat on price.
• Geonode ($0.84/GB) — Most authentically residential feel of the cheap tier.
• F-Netnut / Netnut ($1.00/GB) — ISP-peered pool when latency matters.
• Packetstream ($1.05/GB) — Lowest-trust pool, fine for low-stakes volume.
• F-Iproyal ($1.21/GB) — Cleanest geolocation across DB lookups per dollar.
• F-Private ($1.43/GB) — Proprietary pool tuned for scraping economics.
• Iproyal ($1.47/GB) — Same hygiene as F-Iproyal with SOCKS5.

The honest take: start on Geofast. Switch up the chain only when you can articulate why the cheaper pool is failing.

Premium 5 ($1.50–$4/GB)

When success rate matters more than per-GB cost:

• Goatx ($1.58/GB) — Proprietary auto-routing across relay tiers; best for messy multi-target stacks.
• F-Oxylab ($2.14/GB) — Best success-rate-per-dollar fallback for hard Cloudflare targets.
• F-Lumi ($2.57/GB) — Premium-success pool at F- pricing; second retry step on hard targets.
• Smart / Oxylab ($3.16/GB) — SERP specialist / direct-tier Oxylab. Pay this if it has to work.
• Lumi ($3.68/GB) — The most polished session control. Pick when “it has to work, period.”

The chain pattern that customers run most often: budget pool first (Geofast or F-Private), premium pool as fallback after N retries (F-Oxylab → F-Lumi → Lumi). Roughly halves average $/GB without giving up the ceiling.

Adjacent product families (not part of the 14 residential)

The 14 brands above are all rotating residential, sold per-GB. We also run three other product families that customers often combine with residential — they’re not in the comparison above because they don’t share the per-GB residential billing model.

4G Mobile — sold per-GB (FP-Mobile, ET-Mobile, HD-Mobile)

Hell World–owned 4G modem farms across 115 countries. Carrier-issued IPs from real mobile networks; carrier ASNs are functionally invisible to most anti-bot systems because banning a mobile IP risks banning a chunk of real customers behind the carrier’s NAT.

• FP-Mobile ($2.20/GB) — Less rotation. Once you’ve connected through a modem, the IP tends to stay for tens of minutes to a couple of hours. Right for sneaker checkouts, multi-step KYC, anything session-bound.
• ET-Mobile ($2.50/GB) — Rotates aggressively. Modem cycling and carrier NAT renegotiation happens often, so you see IP changes within minutes. Right for rotation-per-job (scraping, mass account discovery, ad QA).
• HD-Mobile ($2.20/GB) — Independent mobile pool. Different carrier mix and routing layer; same per-GB pricing as FP-Mobile. The brand to swap in when you need IP diversity beyond what FP-Mobile alone offers.

Browse mobile plans.

Static ISP — sold per-IP/month

Dedicated static ISP IPs in 5 countries (US, UK, DE, JP, occasionally FR). You get the same IP for as long as your subscription is active. ISP IPs sit between residential (high trust, rotating, expensive per GB) and datacenter (cheap, low trust). For AI agent fleets where you want each agent to consistently appear from the same place — so target sites build session memory rather than seeing a brand-new visitor every page — static ISP is the right shape. Around $2/IP/month. Browse ISP plans.

Unlimited — sold per-day or per-month flat rate

Two flavors:

• Unlimited ISP — Flat-rate plan over our USA-only ISP pool (~60K IPs). No per-GB charge; pay $17.50/day or $175/month and burn as much bandwidth as you can. Break-even vs metered residential is around 8–10 GB per day per IP — past that this tier is dramatically cheaper. Where it makes sense: heavy SERP scrapers, ad verification at scale, price-monitor crawlers. Note the geographic limitation: USA only.
• Unlimited Residential — A wireless-residential unlimited tier. Flat-rate residential bandwidth at a price point where it’s economically viable to resell (some customers run their own proxy product on top of this). It’s the closest thing on our shelf to “supplier-grade” infrastructure for someone building a downstream proxy business. If you’re scraping at multi-TB/month volumes or building a product on top of residential bandwidth, this is the tier to look at.

Compare unlimited plans against your monthly burn to see if the math flips.

Hellworld vs buying direct: cost math

Run the numbers on going direct to test five providers:

• Bright Data starter — $50 minimum, $8-15/GB
• Oxylabs starter — $99 minimum, $4-8/GB
• Smartproxy starter — $50 minimum, $4-7/GB
• NetNut starter — $300 minimum, $4-6/GB
• IPRoyal starter — $7 minimum but practical entry $50, $3-5/GB

That’s roughly $549 in minimum commits to genuinely compare five networks, and most of that bandwidth sits unused while you’re testing. If three of the five aren’t right for your use case, that money is gone.

Same five through hellworld.io: top up $50 once, allocate it across whichever brands you want, swap in the dashboard. We carry the inventory risk; you carry the working capital.

That’s the entire economic argument for using a group-buy aggregator. We don’t pretend we have a magic pool — we have the same pools as everyone else, plus the unit economics from buying in bulk and the cross-brand portability. The pricing comparison page shows live $/GB for all 14 side by side.

How to actually pick

The honest version of “how do I pick the right brand” is: you don’t, in advance. You set up a fail-over chain and let production traffic decide.

A starting recipe for a new project:

1. Start cheap. Buy 5 GB of Geofast. Route your target traffic through it.
2. Watch the failures. If you see a particular pattern (CAPTCHA challenges, geo-rejections, rate limits), that tells you which brand class you actually need. Cloudflare challenges → premium residential (F-Oxylab → F-Lumi → Lumi). Geo-rejections → IP-hygiene-cleaner brand (Iproyal / F-Iproyal). Scraping cost dominating → F-Private. Multi-region targets → Goatx. Hard rate limits / Akamai pixel → 4G Mobile.
3. Add a second brand as fallback. Configure your scraper / bot to retry through brand B when brand A returns the bad-pattern response. Most stacks support a proxy list with priority ordering.
4. Iterate weekly. Anti-bot vendors push updates. What worked in March may not in May. The customers who succeed treat brand selection as ongoing tuning, not a one-time decision.

There is no permanent “use Lumi for SNKRS” answer. There’s only “this is what’s working this week for this stack.” The cheat code, if there is one, is being inside a sneaker / scraping community where this kind of intel circulates daily — find a Discord, find a cookgroup, find a scraping forum. Our #help channel is one of those, but plenty of other communities are doing the same thing.

FAQ

Which brand should I use for Nike SNKRS / Footlocker / Supreme / Ticketmaster / [your specific target]? There’s no permanent answer — drops change, anti-bot rules update, what works in April may fail in June. The current rough playbook lives on our sneaker proxy page, but the deeper reality is: find a cookgroup or Discord that’s running the same target daily, talk to people who cooked yesterday, and run your own A/B tests. Anyone who claims a permanent ranking is selling you something.

Are residential proxies legal? Using residential proxies is legal in most jurisdictions when you respect the target site’s terms of service and applicable laws (CFAA in the US, GDPR in the EU, etc.). All twelve aggregated brands route to pools that require explicit consent from the SDK-installed peers whose IPs you’re using; the two proprietary pools (Goatx, F-Private) operate under our own consent and routing infrastructure. Compliance for what you do with the bandwidth is on you.

Why are some brands prefixed with F-? The F- prefix denotes a different internal routing variant — same pool family as the non-prefixed sibling, but a different routing/peering layer with its own latency profile and session-control granularity. We pass the cost difference through. Performance varies by target, so test both if budget allows.

What makes Goatx and F-Private “proprietary”? We deploy and operate the underlying infrastructure for both, rather than reselling another network’s pool. Goatx is built around a multi-relay routing layer that auto-picks gateways; F-Private is a leaner deployment tuned for scraping-economics rather than retail polish. Different design philosophies — neither is universally better than aggregating from a public-supplier pool, but the proprietary pricing tiers ($1.43–$1.58/GB) sit nicely between cheap aggregates and premium tiers.

Does hellworld.io see my traffic? We log destination hostnames for abuse-prevention and capacity-planning; we do not log payloads or response bodies. We’re a passthrough — encrypt at the application layer if your traffic is sensitive.

A brand banned my account / pool blocked my target. What now? Hot-swap to another of the 13 from the same dashboard. This is the actual reason customers stay with us instead of going direct — when one network has a bad week (and they all do), you don’t have to onboard a new vendor at 2am.

Is Bright Data still worth the premium post-rework? For high-stakes targets where success rate dominates cost, yes. For everyday work, F-Oxylab at $2.14/GB delivers most of the value at lower cost.

Can I bring my own scraping framework? Yes. Every brand speaks standard HTTP/SOCKS5 with user:pass auth and works with Scrapy, Puppeteer, Playwright, undetected-chromedriver, Crawlee, anything that accepts a proxy URL.

Do you offer a free trial? No — bandwidth costs us real money, so the abuse economics don’t work. We do offer top-ups starting at $5 so you can test any brand at meaningful volume without committing to vendor minimums.

Where do I start if I’m new? Geofast for general residential scraping, FP-Mobile for sneaker work, Static ISP for AI agents (the per-IP/month adjacent product). $5 top-up, route some traffic, see what fails, adjust.

What’s next

This is the first post in what will become a series. Coming over the next few weeks: a deep-dive on anti-bot vendor evolution (DataDome 2026 fingerprint stack, Cloudflare’s Turnstile v2, Akamai pixel changes); a sneaker stack post that walks through Footsites, Shopify Plus, and SNKRS configuration; and an AI agent infrastructure post on session memory, IP-per-agent allocation, and cost modeling at scale.

If you want one of those sooner, mention it on our Discord — we triage editorial partly by what customers ask for.

In the meantime, the pricing comparison page is the fastest way to see all 14 brands at current prices. Drop a $5 top-up, route some traffic against your actual target, and form your own opinion. That’s still the only proxy comparison that matters.