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The best free proxy option depends on the kind of free access you need. Webshare offers a documented permanent free plan; Oxylabs describes a one-month datacenter allocation and separate trials; Bright Data and ScraperAPI describe free request or API tiers; ProxyScrape publishes freely accessible lists and tools. Public lists such as those indexed for IPRoyal, Geonode and HideMy.name have lower entry friction but are not equivalent to an accountable, provider-managed account.
No current evidence supports a universal performance ranking of these services. Compare the offer type, IP control, quota, integration, privacy exposure and the target site’s rules before sending production traffic.
What counts as a “free proxy”?
Search results often combine four different products:
- Managed free plans: a provider assigns proxies under an account with a stated quota.
- Time-limited trials: access expires after a stated period or when trial traffic is consumed.
- Scraping APIs: you send a URL to an extraction service and spend requests or credits; you may never receive a raw proxy endpoint.
- Public proxy lists: independently operated addresses published for anyone to try. They can disappear, change owners or intercept traffic.
The options below are therefore grouped by what they actually provide, rather than presented as a misleading speed leaderboard.
#1 Best Overall
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- 【Abundant Security Features】Advanced firewall policies, DoS defense, IP/MAC/URL filtering, speed test and more security functions protect your network and data.
- 【Highly Secure VPN】Supports up to 20× LAN-to-LAN IPsec, 16× OpenVPN, 16× L2TP, and 16× PPTP VPN connections.
- Security - SPI Firewall, VPN Pass through, FTP/H.323/PPTP/SIP/IPsec ALG, DoS Defence, Ping of Death and Local Management. Standards and Protocols IEEE 802.3, 802.3u, 802.3ab, IEEE 802.3x, IEEE 802.1q
At-a-glance comparison
| Option | Free offer described in the cited source | Category | Important qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webshare | 10 permanent free proxies | Managed plan | The official homepage excerpt does not state bandwidth; a secondary comparison reports 1 GB/month, which should be verified in your account. |
| Oxylabs | Five US datacenter IPs, 5 GB, valid one month from activation | Managed plan | Separate seven-day proxy and Web Scraper API trials have different conditions. |
| Bright Data | 5,000 requests/month on selected managed scraping products | Managed request tier | A separate comparison lists 15 datacenter IPs and 2 GB/month; product terms are not reconciled. |
| ProxyScrape | Free proxy list, checker, filters, browser extension and API | Public list and utilities | Free tools are not the same as a provider-managed quota. |
| ScraperAPI | 1,000 API credits/month and five concurrent connections; 5,000 introductory credits for seven days | Scraping API | These figures come from a February 2026 TechRadar review and should be checked against current official pricing. |
| IPRoyal | Public list indexed by AIMultiple | Public list lead | Current endpoint details and operating terms require confirmation on the provider’s own site. |
| Geonode | Region-based public list indexed by AIMultiple | Public list lead | Do not infer availability, anonymity or uptime from the index listing. |
| HideMy.name | Searchable public list indexed by AIMultiple | Public list lead | Verify current addresses, protocols and ownership before use. |
1. Webshare: the clearest recurring free plan
Webshare’s official homepage says it offers a permanent free plan with 10 proxies
. That makes it the most straightforward starting point when you want an account-based service that does not expire after a trial period. The site also documents an API and lists use cases such as pricing intelligence, ecommerce scraping and public product data.
The opened homepage does not establish a bandwidth ceiling. An August 2026 AIMultiple comparison reports 10 shared datacenter proxies and 1 GB per month, but treat that as secondary evidence and confirm the limit shown in your current dashboard. Shared datacenter addresses can be more likely to have an existing reputation problem than dedicated or residential addresses, so test a small, non-sensitive workload first.
Source: Webshare official homepage; secondary quota report: AIMultiple.
2. Oxylabs: a defined datacenter allowance plus separate trials
Oxylabs’ provider-authored guide describes five US-based datacenter IPs, 5 GB of traffic and validity for one month from activation. That is a bounded, easy-to-measure experiment for a scraper that needs US egress rather than a global pool.
Do not merge this allocation with Oxylabs’ other promotions. The same guide separately advertises a seven-day proxy trial and a Web Scraper API trial of up to 2,000 results, with no credit card required. Eligibility and availability can differ by product or account. If your code expects a conventional HTTP or SOCKS proxy, select the proxy offer; if you want returned HTML or structured extraction, evaluate the API trial instead.
Source: Oxylabs’ free-proxy guide.
3. Bright Data: check whether you are getting requests or raw IPs
Bright Data’s 2026 comparison describes 5,000 free requests per month without a credit card for selected managed scraping products. That is a request-based allowance, not automatically a free list of proxy addresses.
AIMultiple separately lists 15 free datacenter IPs and 2 GB per month. The available evidence does not reconcile whether those figures describe the same product, a legacy offer or a different Bright Data tier. Before integrating, open the exact product page, record whether the quota is measured in requests, bandwidth or IP allocation, and check what happens when a request fails.
Rank #2
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- 【Easy Setup】Please refer to the User Manual and the Unboxing & Setup video guide on Amazon for detailed setup instructions and methods for connecting to the Internet.
- 【Pocket-friendly】Lightweight design(145g) which designed for your next trip or adventure. Alongside its portable, compact design makes it easy to take with you on the go.
- 【Full Gigabit Ports】Gigabit Wireless Internet Router with 2 Gigabit LAN ports and 1 Gigabit WAN ports, ideal for lots of internet plan and allow you to connect your wired devices directly.
- 【Keep your Internet Safe】IPv6 supported. OpenVPN & WireGuard pre-installed, compatible with 30+ VPN service providers. Cloudflare encryption supported to protect the privacy.
Source: Bright Data comparison; secondary comparison: AIMultiple.
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ProxyScrape’s pricing page lists a Free Proxy List, proxy checker, online checker, filter, browser extension and API. These tools let you discover and test public HTTP or SOCKS endpoints, which can be useful for a classroom experiment or a disposable, non-authenticated crawl.
A published address is not the same as a managed service. You normally have no contractual control over who operates it, how long it remains online or whether traffic is inspected. Never send login credentials, session cookies, payment data or private API tokens through an untrusted public endpoint.
Source: ProxyScrape pricing and free tools.
5. ScraperAPI: an adjacent API alternative
ScraperAPI belongs in this guide only if you count managed extraction APIs as a proxy alternative. TechRadar’s review updated February 9, 2026, reports 1,000 API credits per month, a maximum of five concurrent connections and 5,000 introductory credits for seven days.
With an API, your application sends a target URL and receives a response; you do not necessarily configure a proxy host in your browser or HTTP client. This can remove connection-pool and rotation code, but it also changes how you measure cost: a credit or request may be consumed per page, retry or rendering feature. Verify the current official plan before relying on the figures above.
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Source: TechRadar’s 2026 review.
6. IPRoyal: public-list lead requiring verification
AIMultiple’s August 2026 index includes an IPRoyal public list. The index is a discovery lead, not enough evidence to state current addresses, protocols, anonymity, uptime or a recurring quota. If you investigate it, visit the provider’s own page, confirm that endpoints are still published, and test ownership and connectivity from your deployment region.
Use only destinations and data for which you have permission. A free address does not transfer responsibility for complying with a site’s terms or applicable law.
Rank #3
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- Increase Capacity and Efficiency – Supporting not only MU-MIMO but also OFDMA technique to efficiently allocate channels, communicate with multiple devices simultaneously
- 5 Gigabit ports – One Gigabit WAN port and four Gigabit LAN ports, 10X faster than 100–Base T Ethernet.
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Source: AIMultiple.
7. Geonode: region-oriented public-list lead
AIMultiple describes Geonode’s indexed public list as region-based. That may help when your test requires a particular country, but the listing does not establish how many addresses are live, how often they rotate, whether they support HTTPS, or who operates them. Treat every endpoint as untrusted until it passes your own checks.
Do not put authenticated scraping, personal information or proprietary request headers through a public list. For a production crawler, a managed account with explicit usage terms is easier to audit.
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8. HideMy.name: searchable public-list lead
AIMultiple lists HideMy.name as a searchable public proxy list. Searchability can reduce the time needed to find an address matching a country or protocol, but no current performance, security or availability guarantee is established by that index entry.
Confirm the endpoint directly, measure latency from your own worker, and discard it if TLS validation fails, the address is unstable or the response is modified. Keep the test target public and low impact.
Source: AIMultiple.
How to evaluate a free proxy safely
1. Define the traffic you need
- Choose HTTP(S) or SOCKS according to your client library.
- Record the required country, city, session persistence and rotation behavior.
- Estimate requests, response bytes, concurrency and retry volume.
- Separate public-page collection from any authenticated or confidential workflow.
2. Confirm the quota and failure policy
Ask whether limits are measured per request, result, gigabyte, IP or month. Find out whether timeouts, CAPTCHA responses and retries consume quota. A nominally large allowance can be inadequate if every retry is billed.
3. Run a controlled health check
Use a harmless page you are allowed to access. Record HTTP status, DNS and connect time, TLS validity, total latency, response size and the observed egress country. Repeat at the concurrency you actually intend to use; a single successful request proves very little.
4. Protect secrets and identify the operator
Use environment variables for proxy credentials, validate certificates, and prevent proxy URLs from appearing in logs. Public endpoints should be considered hostile to credentials and sensitive payloads. A proxy can see metadata and, for non-TLS traffic, content.
Rank #4
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- 【OpenWrt 23.05 FIRMWARE】The Slate 7 (GL-BE3600) is a high-performance Wi-Fi 7 travel router, built with OpenWrt 23.05 (Kernel 5.4.213) for maximum customization and advanced networking capabilities. With 512MB storage, total customization with open-source freedom and flexible installation of OpenWrt plugins.
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- 【PERFECT PORTABLE WIFI ROUTER FOR TRAVEL】The Slate 7 is an ideal portable internet device perfect for international travel. With its mini size and travel-friendly features, the pocket Wi-Fi router is the perfect companion for travelers in need of a secure internet connectivity on the go in which includes hotels or cruise ships.
5. Respect the destination
Read the target site’s terms, robots guidance and access controls. Rate-limit requests, cache responses and stop when the site signals that automated access is not allowed. A proxy changes network origin; it does not grant permission or guarantee access.
Minimal client patterns
For a managed provider, keep the proxy URL in an environment variable rather than hard-coding credentials. The following Python pattern works with any provider that supplies an HTTP(S) proxy URL:
import os
import requests
proxy = os.environ["SCRAPE_PROXY_URL"]
proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}
r = requests.get("https://example.com/", proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
r.raise_for_status()
print(r.status_code, len(r.content))Set SCRAPE_PROXY_URL in your process environment using the exact scheme, host, port and credentials supplied by your provider. Do not paste a public endpoint into production code.
Recommended Free Tools
Security and reliability: why “free” can be expensive
The MADWeb 2024 study by Naif Mehanna, Walter Rudametkin, Pierre Laperdrix and Antoine Vastel examined 640,600 proxies collected from 11 providers over 30 months. Only 34.5% of the collected proxies were active at least once during the tests. The researchers identified 4,452 distinct vulnerabilities on proxy IP addresses and found 16,923 proxies that manipulated content. Those figures describe the study’s collected sample and period; they are not a current scorecard for every named vendor or managed free plan.
The paper’s conclusion is direct: Ultimately, our research reveals that the use of free web proxies poses significant risks to users’ privacy and security.
Use public lists only for low-risk, authorized testing, and prefer an accountable managed plan when you need predictable operations.
Source: MADWeb 2024 paper.
Performance, cost and operational trade-offs
| Need | Usually the better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A small recurring experiment | Webshare or a documented managed tier | Account-level quota and clearer support boundaries. |
| A short US-only test | Oxylabs’ described five-IP allocation | Country, traffic and one-month validity are stated. |
| Rendered or extracted responses | Bright Data managed product or ScraperAPI | Request/API model can remove proxy-pool code. |
| Zero-cost endpoint discovery | ProxyScrape, IPRoyal, Geonode or HideMy.name lists | Low entry friction, but high volatility and security risk. |
Measure total cost, not just the advertised free allowance. Include engineering time for dead addresses, retries, CAPTCHA handling, monitoring, legal review and data-quality checks.
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Troubleshooting common failures
Connection timeout or repeated connection resets
The endpoint may be offline, overloaded or blocked from your worker’s network. Lower concurrency, increase the client timeout modestly, then remove the address from rotation if failures persist.
403, CAPTCHA or an empty response
The destination may detect automation, the IP may have a poor reputation, or the page may require JavaScript. Check the site’s rules, slow the crawl and use a permitted rendering or extraction API rather than repeatedly retrying.
Quota disappears faster than expected
Count retries, redirects, rendered subresources and concurrent jobs. Re-read whether the provider bills requests, results, bytes or failed attempts, and inspect response headers or the account usage page.
Wrong country or inconsistent sessions
Public lists can change operators and locations. Use a managed product with an explicit geo and session option, or record the observed egress address on every test request.
TLS or certificate errors
Do not disable certificate verification to make an unknown proxy work. Replace the endpoint and investigate whether the proxy is intercepting or corrupting HTTPS traffic.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which free proxy is safest for a first scraping test?
A provider-managed free plan with documented limits is generally easier to audit than an anonymous public endpoint. Keep the test to public, non-sensitive pages and verify the current terms before use.
Are free proxy lists legal to use?
The legality depends on how the endpoint was obtained, what you access and the laws and contracts that apply to you. A published address does not grant permission to scrape a destination.
Do free proxies hide my identity completely?
No. The operator can observe traffic and metadata, and destinations can use additional signals such as cookies, browser fingerprints and behavior. HTTPS protects content in transit but does not make the proxy trustworthy.
Should I use a proxy or a scraping API?
Use a proxy when your client must control the network connection directly. Use an API when you prefer returned pages or extracted data and want the provider to handle rotation and connection details.
The Bottom Line
For a small, authorized experiment, start with a documented managed offer such as Webshare or the described Oxylabs allocation, and verify every quota in the current account. Treat Bright Data and ScraperAPI as product-specific request tiers, not generic free proxy lists. Public lists can help with disposable testing but carry substantial reliability and security risk.
Quick Recap
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