Rayobyte vs Webshare 2026: head-to-head comparison

I get asked about these two more than almost any other pair, and the question is usually phrased wrong. People ask which one is better. They are really two different shops. Webshare is a self-serve, low-friction proxy store built around cheap datacenter lists and a free tier. Rayobyte is a US-based provider with a broader catalogue (residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter, plus a scraping API side business) and a more traditional sales and support setup.

Short version of my verdicts. For cheap, high-volume datacenter work where the target is not picky, Webshare is where I start. For residential and mobile traffic aimed at harder targets, where you want a human to talk to and documented sourcing, Rayobyte is the more comfortable pick. For small tests and side projects, Webshare’s free plan wins on price alone. For anything that needs long sticky sessions on one clean IP, I would look at ISP proxies from either, and I would test both before committing.

A note on method. I have used both vendors over the years from Singapore. I have not run a controlled, repeatable benchmark for this article, so I am not going to invent success-rate percentages. Where I give numbers, they are pricing or pool figures from the vendors’ own pages at the time I last checked, and I say so. Prices and pool counts change often, so confirm on the pricing pages before you pay. If you want the longer single-vendor write-ups, they are here: Rayobyte review and Webshare review. More comparisons live in the blog index.

TL;DR comparison table

	Rayobyte	Webshare
Core products	residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter	datacenter, static residential (ISP style), rotating residential
Entry pricing style	tiered plans, residential billed per GB, datacenter per IP or unlimited bandwidth plans	self-serve plans, datacenter per proxy count with bandwidth, residential per GB
Free option	trial or small starter plans, check current terms	free plan with a small number of datacenter proxies
Rotation	rotating gateway plus sticky session options	rotating backbone, per-request or timed rotation, list refresh in dashboard
Geo targeting	country level, plus finer targeting on residential	country level, finer targeting on residential tiers
Auth	user/pass and IP whitelist	user/pass and IP whitelist
Protocols	HTTP(S), SOCKS5 on supported products	HTTP(S), SOCKS5
Support	account team and ticket support, more human	ticket and chat, more self-serve
Target user	teams that want a broad catalogue and a vendor to call	solo operators and devs who want cheap, fast setup
My overall lean	residential, mobile, harder targets	datacenter, budget, testing

Rayobyte at a glance

Rayobyte grew out of Blazing SEO, a US proxy reseller, and rebranded in 2021. It sells four main proxy types: residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter, and it also owns Scraping Robot, which is a managed scraping API. That catalogue is the main reason people pick it. You can start on datacenter, move to residential when a target gets stricter, and add mobile later without opening an account with a new vendor.

What I like. The product pages are specific about what each proxy type is. Residential is billed per GB with volume tiers. Datacenter has options that are billed by IP count with generous or unlimited bandwidth, which suits big crawls of easy sites. They talk openly about how residential IPs are sourced and about requiring consent from the people who run the software that routes traffic. That matters if you care about where your exit IPs come from, and I do, because a badly sourced pool is a risk to your reputation and sometimes to your uptime.

What annoys me. The dashboard has more moving parts than Webshare’s, and the pricing grid takes a few minutes to understand. Entry prices for residential are higher than the cheapest players on the market, and the real savings appear only when you commit to larger monthly volumes.

You can see the full catalogue at rayobyte.com.

Webshare at a glance

Webshare is a Canadian-incorporated provider (I have seen Toronto and Vancouver listed in their materials, check their legal page if it matters to you) that built its name on cheap datacenter proxies and a very clean self-serve dashboard. You sign up, you get a free plan with a handful of datacenter proxies, and you can have a working proxy list in about two minutes. Paid plans scale by number of proxies and bandwidth. They later added rotating residential (billed per GB) and static residential, which behave closer to ISP proxies.

What I like. Setup friction is close to zero. The API is simple, the dashboard lets you download or fetch lists in several formats, and the docs at docs.webshare.io are clear enough that I rarely had to ask support anything.

What annoys me. Datacenter IPs from any budget provider are easy for tougher sites to classify, and Webshare is no exception. Shared datacenter pools get burned on popular targets. Support is more self-serve, so if something strange happens on a Sunday night you are mostly reading docs. And the residential side feels like an add-on to a datacenter business rather than the main event.

Current plans and the free tier are listed on the Webshare pricing page.

Head-to-head

IP pool size

Both vendors publish large residential pool claims. Webshare advertises tens of millions of residential IPs across a very wide country list. Rayobyte advertises a residential pool in the same broad range, on its own pages. I treat these as marketing numbers. Pool size on a sales page tells you the upper bound of what the vendor can route to, not how many unique, clean IPs you will actually see in a week of scraping one target.

On datacenter, the picture is easier to reason about because the pools are actual IP ranges. Webshare sells in blocks of proxies from a set of subnets across a number of countries. Rayobyte’s datacenter offering includes plans that rotate across a pool rather than handing you a fixed list. In practice I care less about the headline number and more about subnet diversity. If your 100 datacenter IPs all sit in a few adjacent /24 blocks, one ban can take out a chunk of them, and that is true on either vendor.

Edge: tie on claims. Run a 24 hour test and count unique /24 ranges in your own logs before you believe either number.

Rotation control

Webshare gives you two models. Datacenter plans give you a fixed list that you rotate yourself in code, plus a “backbone” rotating endpoint that picks an IP for you per request. Residential adds a rotating gateway with session options. The control is simple. You choose per-request rotation or a sticky window, and that is about it.

Rayobyte’s residential gateway offers rotation per request and sticky sessions through username parameters, and datacenter rotating plans do the same on a smaller scale. The knobs are similar in spirit. Where Rayobyte pulls ahead for me is that rotation settings are part of how their docs describe each product, so you are less likely to guess wrong on a first setup.

Edge: slight lean to Rayobyte for residential, slight lean to Webshare for datacenter because you can control your own list in code with no gateway in between.

Geo coverage

Both claim residential coverage across a very large number of countries. Both support country-level targeting, and both offer finer targeting (state or city, depending on the tier) on residential. For datacenter, coverage is more limited. Webshare lists datacenter locations in a few dozen countries, with the US and Europe the deepest. Rayobyte’s datacenter footprint is smaller and US-weighted, which suits US scraping and is thinner for Asia.

From Singapore, the geography matters in a practical way. If you need Southeast Asian exits, residential from either vendor is the sensible route, and I would check the specific country you need before paying, because a long country list does not mean deep coverage in each. For mobile, Rayobyte lists mobile proxies as a product line, while Webshare does not focus on mobile. If you specifically need carrier IPs, that single fact decides it. For a deeper look at running your own mobile gear instead, see my other posts in the blog.

Edge: Webshare for datacenter breadth, Rayobyte for mobile.

Connection success rate

This is the axis everyone wants a number for, and the honest answer is that no vendor can give you one that holds for your target. Success rate depends on the target’s anti-bot stack, your request headers and TLS fingerprint, how fast you hit it, and whether your IPs are already flagged.

What I can say from experience. Datacenter IPs, from either vendor, do fine on APIs, price pages for small retailers, search endpoints with light protection and anything that does not run serious bot detection. They struggle on large retail, ticketing, social platforms and anything behind a major bot-management vendor. Residential IPs do much better on those harder targets, and mobile does best. That ranking holds across vendors, and a better proxy will not fix a bad fingerprint.

Between the two on residential, I have not seen a gap big enough to call from casual use. I would rather tell you to test than pretend. A fair test is simple: same 1,000 URLs, same scraper, same time window, one vendor at a time, log status codes and count 403, 429 and captcha pages separately from timeouts. If you want to understand why a proxy can be fine and your requests still get blocked, the HTTP side is documented in RFC 9110, and most proxy auth failures show up as the 407 status defined there.

Edge: no honest winner without your own test. Mobile favors Rayobyte by product availability.

Speed

Datacenter proxies are fast on both vendors. When I test from Singapore to US targets, the round trip is dominated by distance, so a US datacenter IP will always feel slower from here than a Singapore one. Webshare’s datacenter list tends to feel snappy because the proxies are dedicated or semi-dedicated per account. Residential on both vendors is slower than datacenter by nature, since traffic exits through a real consumer connection, and variance is higher.

Practical advice. Measure time to first byte and total time on your own targets, from your own server, at the times of day you will actually run jobs. A proxy that looks fast at 3am can crawl at peak hours.

Edge: Webshare for raw datacenter speed in my use, residential about even.

Pricing per GB

I will not print a price table I cannot verify today, because both vendors adjust tiers regularly. What I can describe is the shape.

Webshare: residential is billed per GB with a clear public price ladder on the pricing page, and the entry price per GB tends to sit below Rayobyte’s entry price. Datacenter is sold by proxy count with a bandwidth allowance, so the effective cost per GB can be very low if you use the allowance fully.
Rayobyte: residential is per GB with volume tiers where the per-GB price drops as you commit to more. Datacenter includes unlimited bandwidth style plans that are billed per IP, which can be much cheaper per GB if you push a lot of data.

The trap with datacenter is comparing a per-GB figure to a per-IP figure. Do the math on your own monthly traffic. If you move 500 GB a month through easy targets, unlimited-bandwidth datacenter beats any per-GB product. If you move 20 GB a month through hard targets, pay-per-GB residential at the low tier is simpler and the monthly bill is small either way.

Edge: Webshare for entry price and tiny budgets, Rayobyte for volume deals and unlimited-bandwidth datacenter.

Session persistence

Sticky sessions matter for logins, carts and anything where a site notices your IP changing mid-flow. Both vendors support sticky residential sessions with a time window you set through the username string or dashboard. The maximum window differs by product and changes over time, so read the current docs rather than trust me on minutes. Residential sessions can also drop early if the underlying peer goes offline, which is the nature of residential. Plan for reconnects.

For long persistence, ISP style proxies are better. Webshare’s static residential and Rayobyte’s ISP proxies give you a fixed IP that belongs to an ISP range but sits in a datacenter, so it stays up and stays the same for as long as you rent it. This is what I would use for anything account-related. If you run multiple accounts and need stable identities, my notes on pairing proxies with browser profiles are on multiaccountops.com, and the browser side is covered at antidetectreview.org.

Edge: tie. Use ISP proxies from whichever vendor has the country you need.

Concurrent connections

Webshare publishes thread or connection limits on its plans, and the free and low tiers cap you more tightly. Rayobyte generally allows high concurrency on its datacenter and residential gateways, with the practical limit being bandwidth and the target, but check your specific plan because some plans carry caps.

What I would watch is not the vendor limit but the target’s tolerance. Hammering one domain with hundreds of parallel connections from a small IP set is the fastest way to burn a pool. For scraping etiquette, check the site’s robots.txt and terms, and keep your load polite. This is not legal advice, and scraping rules vary by country and by site, so get proper advice if your project is commercial.

Edge: Rayobyte on headroom for large jobs, Webshare is fine for small and medium ones.

Use-case verdicts

Cheap bulk scraping of easy targets

Winner: Webshare. If the site has weak protection, you want the lowest cost per request and a fast setup. A Webshare datacenter plan, or Rayobyte’s unlimited-bandwidth datacenter if you move serious volume, gets this done. At small and medium scale Webshare is simpler and cheaper. At very high volume, run the numbers against Rayobyte’s bandwidth-unlimited plans.

Winner: Rayobyte, narrowly. Here you need residential or mobile, and I value having a support team and clearer sourcing documentation. Webshare residential works, and for modest volumes it can be the cheaper way in, but when a job matters I prefer the vendor with the broader product line behind it. Still, test both on your own URLs.

Account-based work with stable identities

Winner: tie, using ISP proxies. A fixed IP per account is the point. Pick whichever vendor has the country and subnet diversity you need, and keep one IP per identity. Pair it with a proper browser profile setup rather than relying on the proxy alone.

Testing and learning

Winner: Webshare. The free plan lets you try scraping, proxy auth and rotation logic without paying anything. It is the best way to learn how proxies behave before you spend on residential traffic.

Mobile proxies

Winner: Rayobyte, by default. Webshare does not center on mobile. If mobile is your main need, you should also compare against dedicated mobile specialists and against running your own modems, which I cover elsewhere in the blog.

Who should pick Rayobyte

teams or solo operators who expect to need more than one proxy type over time and want a single vendor
anyone who wants documented residential sourcing and a human support channel
jobs that need mobile or ISP proxies from the same account as residential
larger crawls that benefit from unlimited-bandwidth datacenter plans or residential volume tiers
people who are fine with a slightly heavier dashboard in return for more options

Who should pick Webshare

beginners and anyone who wants a working proxy in minutes
budget-first projects, small scrapers and side projects
developers who like a simple API and a clean dashboard
people who want to test with a free plan before paying
datacenter-heavy workloads on targets that do not fight back hard

Verdict overall

No single winner, which is why the frontmatter says “it depends”. If I had to give one piece of advice, it is this: start on Webshare’s free plan to prove your scraper works, then decide whether your targets need residential or mobile. If they do, run a one-day side-by-side of Rayobyte and Webshare residential on your own URLs, with a small budget on each, and let your logs decide. If your targets are easy, stay on datacenter and keep costs low. If they are hard and the job is worth real money, I lean Rayobyte for the breadth and the support, with Webshare as the cost-conscious alternative.

One last point. Neither vendor will fix a weak scraper. TLS fingerprints, headers, request pacing and session handling decide more outcomes than the logo on the proxy. And check that what you are doing is allowed by the sites you target and by the law where you operate. This is not legal or tax advice.

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 2026-10-25.