Start with the per-gigabyte rate
Per-gigabyte pricing is the main unit in this category, so it makes a clean first cut. Across the providers we track the rate spans €0.09 to €8.77, a spread wide enough that two vendors can sit further apart than either sits from its own cheapest tier. Shifter prices residential and ISP traffic at $0.10 to $3.50. Infatica quotes $0.30 to $4 with entry pricing $1. Scrapfly sits tightly at $0.20 to $0.30, and Geonode publishes a single figure of $0.27.
Read a range as a ladder rather than a discount. The floor is what a small trial crawl costs. The ceiling is what a busy month costs once retries and rejected requests are counted. Work out your expected monthly volume before you compare anything, then price both ends of each ladder. A narrow ladder with a high floor is predictable, which some small teams prefer over a cheap headline rate.
Count countries, not marketing adjectives
Coverage is the easiest figure to check and the easiest to misread. Shifter lists from 195 countries and Scrapeless lists 195, while Infatica lists from 195. Geonode reports from 150 and Scrapfly from 190. Our data puts the full spread at 3 to 195.
Decide whether you are actually buying reach. If your targets sit in a single market, a smaller footprint is enough and often cheaper per job. Wide coverage earns its cost only when your crawls have to land in many places. Treat the count as a filter, then confirm the specific countries you need.
Pool size is a tiebreaker, not a verdict
Pool claims are the loudest numbers on these pages and the least comparable. Shifter advertises 205M+ IPs, Scrapeless 90M+ IPs and Infatica 45M+ IPs. Geonode publishes 7.5M+ residential IPs active monthly, which is a residential-only monthly figure rather than a total network count.
A larger pool spreads address reputation and cuts the odds of repeated IPs, which helps at volume. It does not promise cleaner targets. Check the residential share, the rotation mode and whether you can hold a sticky session, and only then let pool size influence your ranking.
Network types explain what your traffic looks like
The types a vendor sells predict how requests appear on the far end. Shifter sells residential and ISP. Scrapfly sells residential and datacenter. Geonode and Scrapeless both sell residential, ISP and datacenter. Infatica is the only brand here that also lists mobile, alongside residential, datacenter and ISP.
Datacenter addresses are inexpensive and fast, and they get refused first when a target is careful. Residential and mobile addresses look like consumer connections and cost more per gigabyte. The usual pattern is datacenter for bulk collection and residential or mobile for the requests that actually matter. Mobile support is the deciding feature if your targets block both hosting ranges and static residential pools.
Trials, tiers and how support reaches you
Shifter, Scrapfly, Geonode and Infatica all offer a free trial, so you can test before you commit. Infatica has no free tier, which makes that trial the only way in. Size the trial to your real workload: a trial that is generous in one region and tiny in another tells you very little about a production crawl.
Support is where plans differ quietly. Geonode lists email, chat and phone, the widest set in this group. Infatica lists email, chat and help centre and Shifter lists email, chat and help centre. Scrapfly lists email, help centre and community and Scrapeless lists help centre and community. Live chat and phone help earn their keep when your team scrapes during working hours. A help centre plus a community forum is enough when runs are scheduled and someone can wait for an answer.
Check who you are contracting with
If this work is heading anywhere near production, the legal entity and headquarters deserve a moment. Scrapfly operates as Joam Intelligence, LLC, headquartered in the US. Geonode operates as Geonode PTE LTD, headquartered in SG. Scrapeless operates as NST LABS TECH LTD. Infatica operates as INFATICA PTE. LTD., headquartered in SG.
Vintage is a soft signal about staying power rather than a quality measure. Shifter was founded in 2012, Scrapfly in 2017 and Infatica in 2019. None of that predicts uptime, but it tells you how long the pricing you just read has been in place.
When a server beats a proxy plan
Not every scraping job needs a proxy network. A small VPS gives you a stable address you control, at a fixed cost you can budget. GreenCloudVPS lists 1.5 TB per month of bandwidth on its budget KVM plan, which suits scheduled crawls against sites that treat datacenter traffic as ordinary.
The trade-off is that you own the consequences. Nobody rotates the address for you, replaces it after a block, or takes a call when the upstream provider throttles your traffic. Buy a proxy plan when rotation and residential reach are the product you are actually paying for. Rent a server when the target sites do not care where the request comes from.
Run the comparison in a fixed order
Build one table and fill the columns in the same sequence every time: per-gigabyte rate and the range around it, country coverage, the network types you need, pool size, trial availability, support channels, then the legal entity. The Proxies and scraping APIs rankings give you the shortlist, and the Shifter, Scrapfly, Geonode, Scrapeless and Infatica write-ups carry the detail for each brand.
Price first, because it carries the widest spread. Coverage second, because it decides whether that price is worth paying. Network types third, since they decide what your requests look like from the outside. Pool size and support settle ties, and company details close the file before signature.