ProxyEmpire vs Webshare: 2026 Head-to-Head Comparison

I run proxies from Singapore for scraping, account operations and testing, and these two vendors keep coming up when people ask me what to buy. They look similar on a pricing page, but they are built for different buyers. ProxyEmpire sells a wide menu: rotating residential, static residential (ISP), datacenter and mobile, mostly billed by bandwidth. Webshare sells a narrower, cheaper, more self-serve menu built around datacenter proxies, with static residential and rotating residential next to them.

My short verdict by use case. If you need mobile IPs or fine geo targeting on residential traffic, ProxyEmpire is the one I would open first. If you need cheap datacenter capacity, a fast signup, or a place to prototype a scraper without a sales conversation, Webshare wins. For high-volume scraping of easy targets, Webshare datacenter is where I would start. For hard targets that block datacenter ranges, residential or mobile from ProxyEmpire is the more realistic path.

A note on method before we go further. I am not going to print a benchmark table of success rates and milliseconds here, because numbers that vary by target, hour and plan would be misleading if I presented them as universal. Where I give figures for pricing or pool size, treat them as vendor claims that you should confirm on the live pricing page before paying. Where I describe behaviour, it is from my own use and from how the products are documented. If you want the full write-ups, I keep separate pages: the ProxyEmpire review and the Webshare review. More proxy guides live in the blog.

TL;DR comparison table

	ProxyEmpire	Webshare
Main products	Rotating residential, static residential (ISP), datacenter, mobile	Datacenter (shared and dedicated), static residential, rotating residential
Mobile proxies	Yes	Not a core product as far as I know, verify before buying
Billing model	Mostly per GB, with plans and some per-IP static options	Datacenter by proxy count and bandwidth tier, residential by GB
Free option	Trial terms vary, check the site	Small free datacenter plan, check current limits
Geo targeting	Country, plus finer targeting on residential, check the dashboard	Strong country spread on datacenter, residential targeting available
Rotation control	Rotating and sticky sessions, per-request or timed	Rotating endpoint on datacenter and residential, sticky options on residential
Support	Live chat and ticket support	Ticket and chat, strong docs and API
Self-serve experience	Good, more menu items to learn	Very simple dashboard, quick to first request
Best for	Hard targets, mobile, geo-specific work	Cheap volume, prototypes, easy targets
Target user	Operators who need IP type variety in one account	Developers and small teams who want low cost and speed to start

ProxyEmpire at a glance

ProxyEmpire is a one-account, many-IP-types vendor. You can sign up and move between rotating residential, static residential, datacenter and mobile without opening another vendor’s dashboard. For people who run multi-step workflows, that matters more than it sounds. When a target tightens up and your datacenter IPs start returning challenges, you can change the IP type on the same account instead of onboarding someone new.

What I like in practice:

IP type variety: mobile and residential in the same dashboard is rare at this price tier.
Geo targeting on residential: you can pick locations in the gateway username parameters, which is how most residential providers work.
Session control: rotating and sticky modes, so you can hold one IP across a login flow and rotate for listing pages.
Bandwidth plans that scale up to larger volumes without forcing a call.

What annoys me:

Per-GB billing punishes careless scrapers. If your script downloads images, fonts and tracking scripts, you pay for each of them. Block resources at the browser level.
More options means more settings to get wrong. New users often leave a rotating session on when they needed a sticky one, then wonder why their login keeps dropping.
Pricing pages change, and the effective cost per GB depends on the plan size you commit to. Do not assume the headline number is what you pay at small volume.

Who ProxyEmpire is aimed at: operators who care about IP quality and variety, and who accept bandwidth billing as the cost of getting it.

Webshare at a glance

Webshare is the vendor I point beginners at first, mostly because of how fast you get to a working request. You sign up, the dashboard gives you a list of proxies or a rotating endpoint, and you can have a scraper using them in minutes. The Webshare API documentation is clear, and being able to manage proxy lists, replace dead IPs and pull credentials programmatically is a real advantage once you automate.

What I like in practice:

Cheap datacenter capacity: the datacenter plans are the reason most people come here.
Simple dashboard and a free datacenter tier that lets you test before you pay, subject to the limits they publish at the time.
A well-documented API for listing, refreshing and replacing proxies.
Static residential (ISP) and rotating residential exist if you outgrow datacenter, so you are not forced to leave when targets get harder.

What annoys me:

Datacenter IPs are easy for sites to classify. Anything with serious bot protection will treat them with suspicion no matter whose logo is on the invoice.
No mobile line that I would build a workflow around. If your use case is mobile-only, you will need another vendor.
Shared datacenter pools mean shared reputation. Another customer’s abuse can burn an IP you are using.

Who Webshare is aimed at: developers and small teams who want predictable, low-cost proxy capacity and a clean API.

Head-to-head

IP pool size

Both vendors advertise large residential pools, and both numbers are marketing claims that nobody outside the vendor can audit. A pool of tens of millions of IPs means little if the subset available in your target country and ASN is thin.

What I check instead: pick the country and city you need, request 200 sessions, and count unique IPs and unique subnets. If you get many repeats inside an hour, the effective pool for your use case is small, whatever the homepage says.

For datacenter, the picture is different. Webshare sells discrete proxies, so pool size is the number you buy plus the replacement allowance. ProxyEmpire datacenter is the less central product on its menu. On pool size, I call it a tie, with the caveat that residential depth by location is what counts and you have to test it yourself.

Rotation control

This is where the two feel most different.

ProxyEmpire gives you rotating and sticky behaviour on residential through gateway parameters, so you decide whether a session holds one IP for a set time or changes each request. For scrapers that walk a paginated list, per-request rotation is fine. For anything with a login, you want sticky.

Webshare gives you a rotating endpoint and proxy lists. On datacenter, “rotation” often means you rotate through your own list in your client, which gives you total control but puts the logic in your code. On their residential product you get a rotating gateway with sticky options.

If you like to own the rotation logic in code (round robin, weighted by recent success, cooling off bad IPs), Webshare lists suit you. If you want the provider to handle it at the gateway, ProxyEmpire is the more convenient fit. Slight edge to ProxyEmpire for convenience, slight edge to Webshare for developers who write their own pool manager.

Geo coverage

ProxyEmpire leans into geo targeting as a selling point on residential and mobile, and it is the one I use when a task needs a specific country or a specific kind of local carrier traffic. Webshare datacenter has a broad spread of countries, which covers most “I need a US or EU IP” jobs, but datacenter location is a hosting location, not a household. Sites that care about the difference will see it.

For a simple rule: if the target only checks country, either works. If the target checks whether the IP looks like a home or mobile user in a specific place, ProxyEmpire is the better bet. Winner: ProxyEmpire.

Connection success rate

Here is the pattern across jobs I have run.

Easy targets (public pages, no aggressive bot protection): datacenter from Webshare succeeds at a rate close enough to residential that paying residential prices makes no sense.
Mid-difficulty targets (rate limits, basic fingerprinting): datacenter works if you slow down and spread requests across many IPs. Residential gives more headroom.
Hard targets (major retail, travel, social platforms, ticketing): datacenter IPs get challenged or blocked early. Residential does better, and mobile does best, because carrier IPs are shared by many real users and sites are reluctant to block them hard.

Success rate depends as much on your headers, TLS fingerprint and request pacing as on the IP. A good proxy with a bad client still fails. Before blaming a vendor, test the same request from your home connection. If it fails there too, the proxy is not your problem.

On hard targets, ProxyEmpire wins by virtue of having mobile and residential options. On easy targets, Webshare wins on cost for the same outcome.

Speed

Datacenter is faster than residential almost every time, because datacenter IPs sit on fast hosting networks while residential traffic travels through someone’s home connection. Webshare datacenter is therefore the faster option for bulk fetching. Residential and mobile traffic through ProxyEmpire will have higher latency and more variance, and mobile is the slowest and most variable of all.

The distance from Singapore matters too. From my side, I see a noticeable difference between proxies hosted near Asia and those across the Pacific or in Europe. If your scraper runs in one region and your proxies are in another, you pay that latency on every request. Run your own test from your actual server, with your actual target, over at least a day. Peak and off-peak behaviour can differ a lot.

Winner on raw speed: Webshare datacenter.

Pricing per GB

Pricing is where reading the fine print saves money.

Webshare datacenter is not primarily a per-GB product. You pay for a number of proxies and a monthly bandwidth allowance, so cost per GB on datacenter is low if you use the bandwidth, and the per-proxy cost is low if you need many IPs. For bulk jobs on easy targets, this is the cheapest option of the two by a wide margin in my experience.

Webshare residential and ProxyEmpire residential are both billed by the GB, and both lower the effective rate as you commit to larger plans. At small volumes the two are in the same neighbourhood, and which one is cheaper changes with promotions and plan tiers. Check both pricing pages on the day you buy. Mobile proxies cost materially more per GB than residential everywhere, because supply is scarcer. ProxyEmpire is the one in this comparison that sells them.

A practical way to compare: estimate your average page weight in KB, multiply by requests per day, and convert to GB. Then multiply by each vendor’s rate at the plan size you will really buy. That calculation, not the headline “from $X/GB”, is your real cost. Blocking images and media in headless browsers often cuts bandwidth by more than half, which changes which plan makes sense.

Winner on cheapest bulk capacity: Webshare. Winner on value for mobile and hard-target residential: ProxyEmpire, since Webshare does not give you the same IP types to compare.

Session persistence

Session persistence means holding one exit IP long enough to complete a multi-step flow: log in, browse, add to cart, check out.

On ProxyEmpire residential and mobile, you set a sticky session through the gateway parameters and the IP holds for a duration you choose, subject to the underlying device staying online. Residential peers can drop, so build your client to detect a lost session and retry rather than assuming it will live for the full window.

On Webshare, static residential (ISP) and dedicated datacenter proxies give you the most stable persistence, because the IP is yours for the billing period. That is the better fit for account work where an IP changing mid-session triggers a security check.

If you need an IP to stay constant for days or weeks, static IPs from either vendor beat any sticky rotating session. If you need persistence for minutes on a residential or mobile address, ProxyEmpire is more flexible. I call this one a tie, split by session length.

For people doing account operations on top of these proxies, the antidetect browser side matters as much as the IP. I cover that in the antidetectreview.org blog, and the account-management workflow side lives at multiaccountops.com.

Concurrent connections

Concurrency is about how many parallel requests you can run before the gateway or the target pushes back.

On a Webshare datacenter list, you can open as many parallel connections as your plan’s bandwidth and the target allow, and since each proxy is a distinct IP, you spread load by using more of them. The limiting factor is usually the target’s per-IP rate limit, not the vendor.

On rotating residential gateways, including ProxyEmpire’s, concurrency is shared across a gateway endpoint. Vendors may apply thread or connection limits by plan, and these differ by product, so read the plan details before sizing a crawler. Very high concurrency on a residential pool also burns bandwidth quickly, so your bill climbs as fast as your throughput.

Both support standard HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy protocols in their products, as defined in RFC 1928 for SOCKS5 and the HTTP semantics in RFC 9110, so any normal client library works. My advice is to ramp concurrency in steps, 10, 50, 200, and watch error rates at each step. The point where errors start climbing is your real ceiling, and it is usually set by the target, not by the proxy vendor.

Winner: Webshare for datacenter bulk, tie for residential.

Use-case verdicts

Bulk scraping of public, low-protection pages

Winner: Webshare. Datacenter proxies are fast and cheap, and for sites that do not fight bots, paying for residential is wasted money. Rotate through your list, respect robots.txt and the site’s terms, and keep request rates reasonable.

Winner: ProxyEmpire. Residential and mobile IPs get through where datacenter ranges do not. Budget for bandwidth, block unneeded resources, and expect to tune your fingerprint as well as your IP choice.

Mobile-specific testing and mobile-only workflows

Winner: ProxyEmpire. Webshare is not where I would go for mobile IPs. If you need to see what a site serves to a carrier connection, or you need carrier-grade IP reputation, this is the clear pick of the two. If mobile is your whole business, also look at dedicated mobile-proxy specialists, but that is a different comparison.

Long-lived static IPs for account work

Winner: it depends. Webshare static residential or dedicated datacenter proxies give you a stable IP at a low price. ProxyEmpire static residential gives you the same idea with its own pricing. Compare current prices for the countries you need, and test the IPs against the specific platform you will use them on, since each platform classifies IP ranges differently. Be careful that your use complies with the platform’s terms and local law. This is not legal advice.

Who should pick ProxyEmpire

You need mobile proxies in the same account as residential.
Your targets block datacenter ranges and you need residential headroom.
You want gateway-level control over rotating versus sticky sessions without writing your own pool manager.
Geo-specific traffic matters, and you want to choose locations per request.
You are willing to manage bandwidth carefully in exchange for IP quality.

Who should pick Webshare

You want to be sending requests within minutes, with a clean dashboard and good API docs.
Your targets are easy to moderate and datacenter IPs work.
Cost per request matters more than IP prestige.
You write your own rotation logic and prefer to manage a list of proxies in code.
You want a low-risk place to prototype before committing budget.

Verdict overall

There is no single winner, and I think anyone who names one without asking your target is guessing. What I would do with my own money: start on Webshare datacenter for anything that works with it, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether your scraper logic is sound. The moment I see blocks or challenges that better request headers cannot fix, I move that specific workload to ProxyEmpire residential, and to its mobile product if residential is still not enough. Many operators end up with both accounts, one for volume and one for difficulty, and that is a sensible setup rather than indecision.

Before you commit to either, run a two-day test against your real target with your real client, log every status code, and compute your cost per successful page. That number tells you more than any comparison article, including this one. Prices and plan limits change often, so check the vendor pages on the day you buy. For more proxy comparisons and setup guides, browse the blog.

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 2026-10-23.