HProxy vs PacketStream

HProxy provides residential, ISP, datacenter, and mobile proxies, as well as web scraper APIs. Its homepage states that its network includes more than 30 million IPs. Proxy products use a shared prepaid balance rather than a subscription, and the balance does not expire. Its scraper API returns structured JSON from a REST call and includes proxies, retries, and parsing. Free tools—a public proxy list, proxy checker, and IP lookup—are available without an account. Setup guides cover Python Requests, cURL, Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, Scrapy, Axios, browser extensions, and profile managers. Supported protocols are HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5. Listed prices include IPv6 proxies at $0.10 a month, IPv4 at $1.34 a month, Residential Lite at $0.50 a month, and rotating ISP proxies at $0.65 a month. Mobile proxies have a 1 GB minimum; web scrapers are billed per successful call from the prepaid balance. HProxy describes scraping, market research, and ad verification as use cases and prohibits activities including unauthorized access, payment fraud, and denial-of-service activity. It says its team replies the same day.

PacketStream provides a peer-to-peer residential proxy network that routes customer traffic through household connections and supports country targeting. For each new proxy connection, its gateway selects a residential exit, so applications can distribute requests without maintaining proxy lists. A session ID can retain the same exit for up to 60 minutes; if the Packeter disconnects, the session fails rather than changing exits. Country targeting uses ISO two-letter codes, and a request fails if no exit is available in the selected country. The gateway supports HTTPS, SOCKS5 and HTTP, with HTTPS recommended. Setup guides cover tools and languages including cURL, Wget, Python Requests, Node.js, PHP Guzzle, Go, Scrapy, Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, Firefox and Chrome. Listed uses include public web data collection, market research, price monitoring, ad verification and localized search tracking. Test credits can be requested, but support decides whether to approve them and how much credit to grant. Residential Proxies is $1 a month, metered at the gateway, with a $50 minimum purchase. PacketStream does not guarantee a particular exit, response time, success rate, availability or uninterrupted session.