Every proxy hides your real IP, but where that replacement IP comes from determines how trusted it looks and how much it costs. The three main types — datacenter, residential and mobile — sit on a spectrum from cheap-and-detectable to premium-and-trusted.
Datacenter proxies
Datacenter proxies are hosted on servers in data centres. They're fast and cheap — often a few dollars per IP or pennies per GB — but their IP ranges are registered to hosting companies, so sophisticated anti-bot systems flag them easily. They're great for non-sensitive, high-speed tasks: accessing sites with light protection, internal testing, or bulk requests where blocks don't matter much. They're a poor fit for social media or heavily protected targets.
Residential proxies
Residential proxies route through real home internet connections (ISP-assigned IPs). They look like ordinary household users, so they're much harder to detect than datacenter IPs and work well for scraping, ad verification and market research. They cost more — typically a few dollars per GB — and performance can vary with the underlying home connections.
Mobile proxies
Mobile proxies route through real 4G/5G cellular devices, so targets see a genuine carrier IP shared by thousands of subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT. This gives them the highest trust score of any proxy type — platforms are extremely reluctant to block carrier IPs. They're the premium option, but a good value provider narrows the price gap dramatically. Mobile is the right call for social media, account creation, sneaker drops and any target with aggressive anti-bot defences.
Best value mobile IPs: Cheapest Proxies delivers genuine 4G/5G carrier proxies from $1.20/GB — closing the price gap with residential while keeping mobile-grade trust.
Visit Cheapest Proxies →Side-by-side comparison
| Type | Trust | Speed | Typical price | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter | Low | Very fast | Cheapest | Light targets, speed-first tasks |
| Residential | High | Variable | Mid–high | Scraping, ad verification, research |
| Mobile | Highest | Fast (5G) | Premium* | Social, accounts, hardest targets |
*Premium, but value providers like our top pick bring genuine mobile IPs close to residential pricing.
Which should you use?
Match the type to the target's difficulty. Use datacenter when the site barely defends itself and you want raw speed. Use residential for general scraping and verification at scale. Use mobile when you need maximum trust — social platforms, account work, and targets that block everything else. Many teams blend all three: datacenter for easy jobs, residential for bulk data, and a smaller pool of mobile IPs for their most sensitive accounts.
Ready to compare the best mobile networks? See our top 10 ranking and full comparison table.