Best Residential Proxy Alternatives for Web Scraping in 2026

Residential proxies are IP addresses assigned by internet service providers to real devices in homes and offices. They’re popular with proxy users because they look like regular internet users to target sites, making them harder to detect and block compared to datacenter proxies. As anti-bot systems grow more sophisticated in 2026, developers increasingly face a choice: spend time managing residential proxy pools and navigating IP blocks, or find smarter alternatives that handle the complexity automatically.