What ProxyLook is
ProxyLook is an editorial directory of every notable residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxy network — currently 162+ entries — plus the major antidetect browsers used to manage proxy traffic. Each provider gets a hand-written review backed by automated benchmarks: success rate against Google SERP and Amazon, P95 latency from a single AWS t3.medium runner in eu-west-1, IP-pool freshness, and ban-rate against Cloudflare-fronted retailers. Reproducible against the workflow on /methodology.
We publish the raw nightly numbers on our benchmarks page with timestamps and target lists, and document our rig setup on the methodology page. No "trust us" black boxes — when we say Bright Data is faster than Smartproxy on Google US/UK SERP, you can sort the live table by route and see the same numbers we did.
How we test
A small Node.js test rig running on a t3.medium in eu-west-1, using each provider's documented entry endpoint, with their SDK where available and raw HTTP otherwise. Targets are rotated nightly across:
- Google SERP (US, UK, IN, DE)
- Amazon (US, UK, DE)
- Walmart, Best Buy, Target (US)
- Cloudflare-fronted retailers (Nike, Adidas, Footlocker)
- Social platforms via mobile network where applicable (Instagram, TikTok)
Concurrency is held at 200 sessions, request budget is 10,000 per provider per night, and we count a "success" as HTTP 200 + content-length > expected baseline + no captcha challenge in body. A run typically takes 35–45 minutes. We discard the warmup minute. The full methodology page has the gory details.
If you want to reproduce a number, email us. We'll send you the run logs.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions. When you click "Visit Bright Data" and end up signing up, Bright Data pays us a small percentage of your first invoice. Same for most major providers. We disclose this on every page in the top bar, and the link is always honest — clicking through doesn't change what you pay or what plan you can choose.
What we don't take: sponsored reviews, paid placements in rankings, "exclusive partnerships" that change our editorial line, or money to remove a negative review. Several providers have offered. We've said no in writing each time.
Our affiliate revenue funds the test rig (about $42/month in EC2 + S3) and the editorial salary. We're not VC-backed. We don't have a growth team. We're four people.
Meet the editorial team
Three named editors with combined 20+ years across web scraping, proxy infrastructure, AI tooling and vendor compliance. Each one owns a beat — and signs every review they write.
Maya runs ProxyLook's nightly benchmark rig and writes the deep-dive editorial reviews on residential and ISP networks.
Helena audits the consent, KYC, and ISO-certification posture of every provider in our directory and writes the procurement-grade reviews.
Devansh covers the AI-native scraping stack — Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, Zyte, Apify, Bright Data Web Unblocker — and the LLM/MCP integration angle.
Need to verify an author's identity for a journalism request, vendor due-diligence, or compliance check? Email [email protected] — we share LinkedIn profiles and prior work 1:1.
Editorial standards
- Every provider review states a "Last tested" date. If it's older than 60 days, we re-run.
- Every numeric claim links to either the test rig output or the provider's own published spec.
- Every affiliate link is marked
rel="sponsored". - If a provider asks for a correction and they're right, we correct in-place and add a changelog entry.
- If we're wrong about something material, we add a "Correction:" block at the top of the affected page.
Contact
Editorial: [email protected]
Corrections / takedowns: same address, subject line "Correction".
Vendors: please go through the contact form; we read every message but don't promise we'll get back same-day.