Mobile Proxies vs Residential Proxies:
Which Actually Works

Quick Comparison

Which Has a Bigger Real IP Pool?

Residential wins on tested pool size. But the gap between what providers advertise and what actually rotates through your requests is the number that matters most here.

Vendor pages advertise huge figures. Oxylabs lists 175M+ residential IPs and Bright Data claims 400M+, while mobile providers like SOAX advertise 33M+ mobile IPs. Independent testing tells a smaller story. Proxyway's 2026 benchmark sent 3.6 million real requests across 13 providers over 21 days and observed about 3.2 million unique residential IPs in rotation, against a median advertised figure of 54 million. Mobile came in lower still: 1.19 million unique IPs tested against a 16 million median advertised figure (Proxyway, "Proxy Market Research 2026," data collected Mar-Apr 2026). That's one benchmark, run by one industry outlet, so treat the exact ratio as directional rather than gospel. But the pattern (advertised pools running well into double digits larger than what shows up in real rotation) is consistent enough to plan around.

Residential pools are larger in absolute terms even after the advertised-vs-tested gap. That gives scrapers more genuinely distinct IPs to rotate through before repeating one. Mobile's smaller pool matters less than the raw number suggests, though, for a reason that has nothing to do with pool size at all.

Ban Resistance Comes Down to CGNAT

Mobile wins here, and the reason is structural, not a bigger pool: carrier-grade NAT.

A platform that bans a mobile IP outright risks blocking a large number of legitimate paying customers on that carrier. That makes carriers and platforms far more reluctant to hard-block mobile ranges. Residential IPs are typically tied to a single household, so banning one has a much smaller blast radius, and platforms do it more freely.

Pricing Gets Closer Than You'd Think at Scale

Residential wins on price at every tier tested, but the gap closes fast once volume shows up.

Proxyway's 2026 benchmark put residential pricing at a median $4/GB entry, dropping to $2.25/GB at the 500GB tier. Mobile started at a median $30/GB, roughly 7.5x more expensive at entry, before falling to $4.38/GB at 5GB and $2.48/GB at 500GB. At high volume, mobile's premium narrows to about 10%. That changes the math for buyers who want mobile's ban resistance but were priced out of it at scale before.

CAPTCHA Solve Rates Don't Tell You Much Anymore

Neither type wins here, because CAPTCHA-solving ability barely correlates with proxy quality anymore. Treating it as a benchmark is a mistake plenty of buyers still make.

In September 2024, researchers at ETH Zurich published a YOLOv8-based object-detection model that solved Google's reCAPTCHAv2 image challenges with 100% accuracy, up from roughly 68-71% in prior published attacks (Plesner, Vontobel, Wattenhofer, arXiv:2409.08831). If an off-the-shelf model solves CAPTCHAs at that rate, they're not the primary defense anymore. IP reputation, device fingerprinting, and behavioral analysis carry more of the weight now, for residential and mobile traffic alike.

That shift raises the stakes for the categories above. A residential IP with a clean reputation and a mobile IP shielded by CGNAT both matter more than whichever proxy type happens to render a CAPTCHA less often.

The Sourcing Question Most Buyers Skip

Neither type gets a clean pass. Both mobile and residential proxy networks have documented cases of recruiting IPs from real people who never explicitly agreed to route someone else's traffic.

Peer-reviewed research from NDSS 2021 identified 1,701 Android APKs (963 distinct apps, roughly 300 million cumulative installs) secretly running mobile-proxy SDKs. Nearly half were flagged malicious by five or more antivirus engines, and most had already been pulled from Google Play by the time researchers published (Mi et al., "Your Phone Is My Proxy," NDSS 2021). On the residential side, a 2022 ACM CCS study identified nearly 9.1 million residential-proxy-as-a-service (RESIP) IPs in China alone, and found that a large majority of those China-located IPs had carried at least one malicious traffic flow during 2021 (Yang et al., "An Extensive Study of Residential Proxies in China," ACM CCS 2022).

Matching Proxy Type to the Job

Different jobs reward different proxy types. Matching the tool to the task beats picking one overall winner.

Who Should Choose What

If neither fits (say you need static, dedicated IPs for account logins rather than rotating traffic), an ISP proxy is usually the better call than either rotating option. Not sure which category your workload falls into? See our breakdown of static vs. rotating proxies first.

Verdict: Category Winners

There's no single winner because the two proxy types solve different problems. Residential gives you more genuinely distinct IPs for less money. Mobile gives you IPs that platforms are structurally reluctant to ban. The right call depends on whether your workload is volume-driven or ban-sensitive.

Summary

For a full setup walkthrough, see our complete guide to proxies for web scraping.