Best proxies for scraping Instagram and TikTok in 2026

Instagram and TikTok are two of the hardest platforms to scrape in 2026. Both have invested heavily in bot detection, both fingerprint at the connection layer before a single pixel loads, and both will shadowban or hard-block IP ranges that show anomalous request patterns. I’ve been running data collection pipelines across Southeast Asia for the past three years, scraping social media for brand monitoring, influencer analytics, and competitor research. The proxy question comes up constantly from operators in my network, and the answer is almost never “any residential proxy will do.”

This list is for people running real workloads: agencies pulling engagement data for clients, SaaS founders building social analytics tools, researchers collecting public posts at scale. If you’re clicking around Instagram manually or testing a hobby scraper, you don’t need a $300/month proxy plan. But if you’re hitting rate limits, getting 429s, or burning through IPs faster than you can rotate them, the proxy layer is almost always the fix and this guide is for you.

I tested or have direct pipeline experience with all seven providers below. My evaluation focused on residential and mobile IP pools specifically, because datacenter IPs are effectively useless against Instagram’s current detection stack and increasingly marginal against TikTok’s. I also looked at sticky session support, geo-targeting granularity, and whether the provider’s IPs actually survive a TikTok or Instagram login flow without triggering a challenge.

how I picked

IP type and pool quality. Residential and mobile IPs are the baseline requirement. I checked pool sizes, ASN diversity, and whether providers buy legitimate ISP allocations or just resell rotated VPN endpoints.
Session control. Instagram in particular requires sticky sessions for any multi-step flow (profile visit, scroll, parse). Providers without per-session IP pinning are difficult to use here.
Geo-targeting depth. City-level targeting matters when scraping geo-restricted content or mimicking local users. Country-only targeting is often insufficient.
Detection survival rate. I ran standard scraping flows and checked how many requests resulted in CAPTCHAs, soft blocks, or hard bans over 24-hour windows.
Price transparency and fair billing. Some providers quote attractive per-GB rates then add connection fees or minimum commitments that balloon the real cost.
Documentation and support quality. Operators don’t have time to debug proxy config issues. I weighted providers who have clear integration docs and responsive technical support.

the picks

Bright Data

Bright Data is the market leader and, for Instagram and TikTok workloads, it’s usually my first recommendation for teams with real budget. Their residential pool sits above 72 million IPs across 195 countries, and their mobile proxy network is one of the few I’ve seen survive aggressive TikTok login flows consistently. City-level and ASN-level targeting is available on both residential and mobile plans, which matters when your scraping targets are geo-specific.

The proxy manager dashboard is genuinely useful once you get past the onboarding. You can set rotation rules per zone, configure sticky session duration (up to 30 minutes on residential), and monitor success rates in real time. For Instagram, I typically use their residential proxies with 10-minute sticky sessions and rotate on 429 or CAPTCHA responses. For TikTok, mobile proxies with shorter rotation windows perform better. Their documentation is detailed enough that you can get a working rotation setup without opening a support ticket.

Residential pool over 72 million IPs with city-level targeting
Mobile proxies that survive TikTok login flows
Sticky sessions up to 30 minutes, real-time dashboard
Most expensive option on this list, pricing starts around $8.4/GB for residential
Onboarding can be complex for operators new to proxy zones

Pricing: residential from ~$8.4/GB pay-as-you-go, volume discounts available. Mobile proxies priced separately. Link: brightdata.com | our full Bright Data review

Oxylabs

Oxylabs competes directly with Bright Data at the enterprise tier. Their residential network is around 100 million IPs and they’ve been vocal about sourcing ethics, publishing details on their peer SDK used to recruit residential nodes. For TikTok specifically, I’ve had good results with their ISP proxies, which combine datacenter speeds with residential ASN registration. That combination cuts bandwidth costs substantially compared to pure residential while still passing TikTok’s basic IP reputation checks.

Their Next-Gen Residential Proxies feature uses AI-assisted routing to pick exit nodes most likely to succeed for a given target. I haven’t been able to independently verify how that routing logic works, but in practice success rates on Instagram profile scraping ran noticeably higher than with their standard residential pool. The tradeoff is a higher per-GB rate for the Next-Gen tier. If you’re running a high-volume pipeline and can absorb the cost, it’s worth benchmarking against standard residential for your specific use case.

100M+ residential IP pool with strong ethical sourcing documentation
ISP proxies offer a cost-efficient middle ground for TikTok
Solid API with multiple integration options
Premium pricing similar to Bright Data
Some geo-targeting features locked to higher-tier plans

Pricing: residential from ~$8/GB, ISP proxies from ~$15/GB. Link: oxylabs.io | our full Oxylabs review

Smartproxy

Smartproxy sits in the mid-market and punches above its weight for smaller teams. The residential pool is around 55 million IPs and their interface is considerably simpler than Bright Data’s. If you’re onboarding a junior developer to manage your scraping infrastructure, Smartproxy’s dashboard won’t overwhelm them. For Instagram scraping, their sticky session support (up to 30 minutes) works well for session-based flows, and I’ve had acceptable success rates on public profile scraping without needing to tune rotation aggressively.

Their X Browser integration is worth mentioning for operators also running multi-account management workflows, since it pairs cleanly with the proxy backend. If you’re interested in that angle, the team at multiaccountops.com/blog/ covers proxy and anti-detect browser combinations in more depth than I’ll go into here. For pure scraping without browser automation, the standard residential pool and a Python requests setup is sufficient.

Clean, beginner-friendly dashboard
Sticky sessions up to 30 minutes on residential
Competitive entry-level pricing
Smaller pool than Bright Data or Oxylabs
Mobile proxy network is less developed

Pricing: residential plans from $75/month for 5GB, pay-as-you-go available. Link: smartproxy.com | our full Smartproxy review

IPRoyal

IPRoyal is where I’d point a solo operator or small team that needs quality residential proxies without committing to a monthly plan. Their pay-as-you-go residential pricing sits around $7/GB with no minimum commitment, which makes it easy to test before scaling. The pool is smaller than the top-tier providers at around 8 million IPs, but the IPs I’ve tested have shown solid cleanliness, with low rates of appearing on public blocklists.

For Instagram, IPRoyal’s residential proxies work fine for read-only scraping of public profiles and hashtag feeds. Where I’d hesitate is high-concurrency TikTok scraping with aggressive rotation, where the smaller pool size can mean hitting the same IP ranges repeatedly across parallel workers. If your workload is moderate volume and you want to avoid long-term contracts, IPRoyal is worth testing. They also sell static residential (ISP) proxies which have clean ASN records and decent TikTok survival rates.

No minimum commitment, true pay-as-you-go
Good IP cleanliness for the price
ISP proxy option for TikTok
Smaller pool size limits high-concurrency use cases
Fewer advanced routing features

Pricing: residential from ~$7/GB, static residential (ISP) from ~$2.40/proxy/month. Link: iproyal.com

SOAX

SOAX is one of the better options if mobile proxies are your primary requirement. They have a dedicated mobile proxy pool with 4G and 5G IPs across major carriers, and their targeting goes down to carrier level, not just country or city. That granularity matters for TikTok, whose recommendation algorithm and content availability vary by carrier in some markets. For operators scraping TikTok content to study regional trends, being able to target a specific carrier in a specific city is a meaningful advantage.

Their interface took some getting used to, and the documentation is thinner than Bright Data’s. But support response times have been reasonable in my experience, and they’ve been improving the API steadily. Pricing is subscription-based, which makes SOAX less flexible for intermittent workloads but reasonable if you’re running continuous pipelines. One thing to verify before signing up: their pool coverage is stronger in Europe and North America than in Southeast Asia, so test your target geos before committing.

Strong 4G/5G mobile proxy pool with carrier-level targeting
Good for TikTok scraping where carrier targeting matters
Consistent IP rotation performance
Subscription-only, no true pay-as-you-go
Thinner documentation than top-tier providers
Southeast Asia coverage can be inconsistent

Pricing: plans start around $99/month for residential, mobile pricing varies by plan. Link: soax.com

NetNut

NetNut takes a different technical approach. Their network is built on ISP-level partnerships rather than peer-sourced residential nodes, meaning their IPs are registered to legitimate ISPs and route through ISP infrastructure directly. This produces lower latency than typical residential proxies and consistent IP quality since the pool isn’t dependent on user SDK installs. For TikTok scraping at scale, the lower latency translates to faster page loads and higher throughput per worker.

The tradeoff is pool size. NetNut’s network is smaller than the large residential providers, so at very high concurrency you’ll start seeing IP reuse that can trigger platform-side anomaly detection. For mid-volume TikTok scraping where you want speed and IP stability rather than pool diversity, NetNut is a strong pick. Instagram’s detection is more sensitive to IP reputation than pure rotation volume in my experience, and NetNut’s clean ISP IPs hold up well there.

ISP-level IP quality with lower latency than residential
Good for TikTok scraping where throughput matters
Stable, predictable IP assignment
Smaller pool limits very high concurrency
Pricing is higher per GB than residential alternatives

Pricing: ISP proxies from ~$15/GB, volume tiers available. Link: netnut.io

Proxy-Cheap

The name is accurate. Proxy-Cheap offers one of the lowest per-GB rates in the residential market, often around $5/GB or less on larger plans. For operators who need to run cost-sensitive scraping at moderate scale, it’s worth testing. I’ve used their residential proxies for Instagram public profile scraping and the results were acceptable for read-only flows. The IP pool is mid-sized and the dashboard is functional without being impressive.

Where I’d caution against Proxy-Cheap is high-stakes, mission-critical pipelines. If your business depends on the scraper running reliably, you want a provider with enterprise-grade SLAs and support. Proxy-Cheap’s support is slower and their uptime guarantees are thinner. For side projects, agency overflow work, or testing new scrapers before committing to a larger plan elsewhere, the price is genuinely attractive.

Very competitive pricing, often below $5/GB
Decent residential pool for moderate-volume work
Low barrier to entry for testing
Support quality and response times lag behind top-tier providers
Not suited for mission-critical or high-availability workloads

Pricing: residential from ~$5/GB depending on volume. Link: proxy-cheap.com

comparison table

Provider	Starting Price	Primary Strength	Primary Weakness
Bright Data	~$8.4/GB residential	Largest pool, best mobile proxies	Most expensive, complex onboarding
Oxylabs	~$8/GB residential	100M+ pool, ISP proxies	Premium pricing
Smartproxy	~$15/GB or $75/mo	Ease of use, good mid-market option	Smaller pool
IPRoyal	~$7/GB	No minimums, pay-as-you-go	Smaller pool, fewer features
SOAX	~$99/mo+	Mobile proxy, carrier targeting	Subscription-only, thinner docs
NetNut	~$15/GB	ISP-quality IPs, low latency	Smaller pool, higher cost
Proxy-Cheap	~$5/GB	Lowest price point	Support quality, not enterprise-grade

how to choose

The most important decision is IP type. Instagram and TikTok both run IP reputation checks before serving content. Datacenter IPs fail these checks quickly because they appear in bulk ASN ranges associated with hosting providers. Residential IPs registered to consumer ISPs pass more easily. Mobile IPs, which are registered to carrier networks, pass even more reliably for TikTok specifically, likely because TikTok’s core user base is mobile-native and carrier IPs look organic. For most operators, residential proxies are the right starting point, with mobile proxies worth testing if you’re hitting high block rates. You can read more about proxy types and use cases on the proxyscraping.org blog.

Session management is the second major variable. Instagram requires multi-step interactions for anything beyond basic public page scraping. Profile visits, scrolling feeds, and reading Stories all require maintaining a consistent session. Providers that only offer rotating IPs on every request will break these flows. Look for configurable sticky session duration, ideally 10-30 minutes. TikTok is somewhat more forgiving on this but still benefits from session stability when you’re mimicking normal browsing patterns. Understanding how TikTok’s developer platform handles authentication helps clarify why session-aware proxies matter.

Budget and volume shape the decision significantly. At low volume (under 10GB/month), pay-as-you-go options like IPRoyal or Proxy-Cheap let you test without locking into plans. At medium volume (10-100GB/month), the mid-tier plans from Smartproxy or Oxylabs offer better economics. At high volume, Bright Data’s volume discounts and enterprise contracts start making sense. Be aware that Meta’s platform policies draw a distinction between data access via their official APIs versus scraping, so your use case and legal context should inform your approach.

Finally, match the provider’s pool geography to your target data. If you’re scraping TikTok content from Southeast Asian markets, verify that your provider has meaningful IP coverage in those countries and that their city-level targeting actually works there. Ask providers for pool size breakdowns by region before committing. Some providers have impressive global totals that mask thin coverage in specific markets you actually care about. For anti-detect browser setups that pair with proxy infrastructure, antidetectreview.org/blog/ covers the tooling side of multi-account and scraping workflows in detail.

verdict / top pick

For most operators running Instagram and TikTok scraping at a real scale, Bright Data is still the best overall choice. The pool size, mobile proxy quality, and session control options outclass the competition, and the per-GB pricing is competitive at volume. The complexity of setup is the main friction, but for production pipelines it’s worth the investment.

If budget is the primary constraint, IPRoyal is my second pick. The pay-as-you-go model removes financial risk during testing, and the IP quality is solid for the price. Step up to Smartproxy or Oxylabs when your volume grows past what IPRoyal’s pool can handle cleanly.

For TikTok specifically with carrier-level targeting needs, SOAX’s mobile network is worth the higher price. And if you’re optimizing for throughput and your concurrency is moderate rather than massive, NetNut’s ISP proxies hit a sweet spot of speed and IP quality that’s hard to match.

Written by Xavier Fok

disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-05-19.