Webshare Alternative

Who each provider is built for

Different companies, different bets

Webshare

Webshare competes on price and self-service. The product is designed so a developer can sign up, take ten free proxies, and be running inside a few minutes without speaking to anyone. The catalogue is broad on the fixed-line side — rotating residential, static residential in private and dedicated flavours, and a large datacenter pool from $0.018 per IP — and the pricing is published openly, which is more than many competitors manage.

The trade-off is depth in the places that need a human: there is no mobile product, no published rollover policy, and no third-party sourcing certification. For a solo developer scraping public data at volume, none of that is likely to matter. For a compliance-reviewed procurement process, all three will come up.

ProxyEmpire

We built around a different bet: that the hard part of proxy work is not acquiring bandwidth cheaply but getting a session that survives contact with a defended target, and being able to explain where the IP came from when someone asks. That shapes the product — mobile carriers alongside fixed lines, ISP-level targeting, sessions that stay sticky when you need them to, bandwidth that does not evaporate, and a sourcing chain that has been reviewed by someone other than us.

We are an aggregator rather than a single network. We combine supply from multiple vetted providers, which is how we reach coverage a single pool cannot and keep a country online when one supplier degrades. It also means compliance is the thing we select suppliers on, because the model only works if the supply is clean.

Side-by-side, with sources

Every figure sourced and linked · verified 1 September 2026

Comparison pages usually quote whichever numbers flatter the author. Below, every claim about Webshare comes from Webshare’s own website on the date shown, and every claim about ProxyEmpire comes from our published pricing or our live targeting API. Where Webshare is better, the table says so.

All figures verified 1 September 2026. Webshare figures from webshare.io and its pricing and residential proxy pages. ProxyEmpire figures from our pricing page and live targeting API on the same date. Prices change — check both before deciding.

What each provider actually costs

Reading past the headline rate

Here is the part most comparison pages get wrong: the two providers charge almost exactly the same money. Not approximately — identically, at most tiers.

Where Webshare fits better

Where we would not pretend otherwise

A comparison that finds no merit in the competitor is marketing, not analysis. Two areas where Webshare is the better pick:

A published price above 1 TB

Their table runs to 3,000 GB at $1.40/GB. Ours stops at 1,000 GB and we quote beyond that. If you want a fixed public number at 3 TB rather than a conversation, they have one and we do not.

Very large single-country pools

80 million residential IPs is a larger footprint than our 30 million. If your work needs enormous IP diversity within one country, or coverage somewhere we do not reach, the bigger pool matters. For most workloads the constraint is session quality and targeting rather than raw pool size, but where it is volume, they have more of it.

Free tier and cheap datacenter proxies

Ten free proxies with no card is a genuinely low-friction way to start, and datacenter IPs from $0.018 each are hard to beat for tasks that do not need residential authenticity. Our entry point is a $1.97 trial, which is cheap but not free.

Where ProxyEmpire is the better choice

Three things Webshare does not publish

Mobile proxies

Webshare’s product line covers rotating residential, static residential and datacenter. Mobile — real 4G and 5G carrier IPs — is not among them. We run a mobile network, and it is targetable to individual carriers. In the United States that means Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile USA, UScellular, Boost Mobile, C Spire, Optimum Mobile and others; in smaller markets it means the one or two national carriers that exist.

This matters because carrier IPs are scored differently by anti-bot systems. Traffic arriving on a mobile ASN, behind carrier-grade NAT shared by thousands of real subscribers, is far harder to treat as suspicious than traffic on a fixed line. For social platforms and mobile-first targets it is often the difference between working and not. See rotating mobile proxies.

Bandwidth that does not expire

Our unused gigabytes roll over. Webshare’s pricing page does not mention rollover. That sounds like a minor billing detail until a project pauses for a month, or a client delays sign-off, and you discover the bandwidth you paid for has gone. On a 500 GB plan, a single idle month is real money.

This also changes the price comparison. A cheaper per-GB rate on bandwidth that expires is not straightforwardly cheaper than a higher rate on bandwidth that does not — the honest calculation depends on how evenly you consume it.

Certified ethical sourcing

We work as an aggregator: rather than running one network, we combine supply from vetted providers, and compliance is what we select on. Every provider must show that the people whose connections carry the traffic opted in, are compensated and can leave at any time. Our sourcing is certified by the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, which reviews how a provider acquires IPs and how consent is obtained.

Webshare’s pricing page references a fair usage policy but states no sourcing certification. If your legal or procurement team asks where the IP addresses come from — and in regulated industries they will — a third-party certification is an answer. Read more about how we source.

Targeting: closer than most comparisons admit

Correcting a common claim

Both services reach comparable geographic precision. The differences sit at the edges, and they are the ones worth knowing:

The real difference is narrower and worth stating precisely:

Both services reach ZIP-code precision. The difference is at the edges: we can pin a session to a named ISP or a specific mobile carrier, which Webshare cannot, because they have no mobile product. Our targeting is queryable through the same API our dashboard uses, so the available regions, cities, ISPs and carriers for any country can be read directly rather than taken on trust — see any of our location pages for what that looks like in practice.

Protocols, integration and day-to-day use

The parts you live with

Both providers speak the protocols that matter. Webshare publishes HTTP and SOCKS5 support; we support HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. In practice, any tool that can take a proxy string — a browser automation framework, a scraping library, an anti-detect browser, a commercial SEO tool — will work with either service, because both use standard username-and-password authentication over a gateway host.

The differences show up in the details of a working day rather than in a feature matrix:

Session control

Rotating sessions suit stateless work: fetch a page, parse it, discard the IP. The moment a task involves a login, a shopping basket or a multi-step form, you need the IP to hold still. Both providers offer sticky sessions; the question worth testing is how long they actually hold under load on your target, which no comparison page can answer for you.

Getting the credentials right

Both services build targeting into the username string, so a single gateway endpoint serves every country and every session type. That is convenient, and it is also the most common source of confusion for new users — a mistyped parameter fails open to a different country rather than throwing an error. Test a handful of requests and confirm the exit IP before scaling. Our proxy checker reports country, ISP and anonymity level for any proxy, whoever sold it to you.

Support when something breaks

Both providers advertise round-the-clock support. The meaningful question is what happens on the third message, when the easy answers have not worked and someone needs to look at your actual traffic. We staff human support and assign dedicated managers on larger accounts. We would encourage you to test this the same way you test anything else — open a ticket with a hard question before you commit budget, and see what comes back.

Which should you choose

By use case

How we verified this comparison

Our method, so you can check it

This page is published by ProxyEmpire, so you should read our conclusions with that in mind. What we can offer instead of asking for trust is a method you can repeat.

Two rules we applied while writing. First, no statistic appears here unless we could point at its source — which is why you will not find a claim about how many IPs Webshare has in a specific country, or a market-size figure for the proxy industry. Second, where the honest answer favours the competitor, the page says so; the tables above mark the rows where Webshare wins, and a whole section explains when to choose them.

If you find something on this page that is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it. That includes claims in our favour.

Frequently asked questions