IPRoyal vs. Webshare: Which is provider is cheaper? [2026]

Search IPRoyal vs Webshare and the top results are the two vendors' own comparison pages. Webshare's page prices its ISP proxies at $0.30 each against IPRoyal's $1.80.

The $0.30 rents a shared IP for a month; the $1.80 rents a dedicated one for 24 hours.

IPRoyal's page returns the favor and quotes Webshare's residential rate as $7 per GB, which is the crossed-out list price; the live one is $3.50.

I pulled both pricing pages on 3 October 2026 and put each product in the same units.

Disclosure: my employer sells proxies too (see the bio), so check my numbers against the sources I name.

IPRoyal vs Webshare: what's the difference?

The main difference between IPRoyal and Webshare is the billing model. Webshare sells cheap monthly subscriptions, a free 10-proxy plan, and shared datacenter IPs from $0.03 each. IPRoyal charges roughly twice as much per residential GB, but that traffic never expires, and it sells mobile proxies. For steady monthly scraping, pick Webshare. For irregular jobs or mobile IPs, pick IPRoyal.

Webshare is a US company founded in 2018 and owned by Oxylabs since 2022, according to our own Proxy Market Research. Datacenter proxies are still its most popular product.

IPRoyal started in 2021, is independent, and fills its residential pool through its own bandwidth-sharing app, Pawns.

If you've read our IPRoyal vs Oxylabs comparison, think of Webshare as the budget arm of that same group.

Side-by-side comparison

Webshare is cheaper on each product I could match like for like. IPRoyal has what Webshare lacks: non-expiring traffic, mobile proxies, dedicated IPs by default, and crypto or PayPal checkout.

Prices come from each vendor's pricing pages on 3 October 2026. Pool sizes are the advertised figures; the measured ones are further down.

Is Webshare cheaper than IPRoyal?

Yes. Webshare is cheaper than IPRoyal on residential, datacenter, and ISP proxies once you compare the same unit.

On residential traffic the gap is close to 2x at each tier I checked up to 100 GB.

Residential: about half the price per GB

*From Proxyway's standardized pricing table, spring 2026. IPRoyal's public page only shows 1, 2, and 10 GB cards.

IPRoyal's headline $1.75 per GB needs a 10 TB order, and Webshare's $1.40 needs 3 TB. Neither number means much to someone buying 10 GB.

Proxyway's report explains how the gap opened. Over the past year IPRoyal dropped its long-running 50% coupon, while Webshare cut its rates in half.

Datacenter and ISP: shared against dedicated

The per-IP prices both vendors quote describe different products. Webshare's cheap tiers are shared IPs, while IPRoyal's datacenter and ISP proxies are dedicated to one customer.

Webshare's 100 datacenter proxies for $2.99 a month work out to $0.03 each, and other customers use the same addresses.

IPRoyal's start at $1.57 per proxy for 30 days, or $1.39 on a 90-day term, and each one is reserved for you.

Webshare does sell a dedicated datacenter tier, listed from $0.825 per proxy. That's the fair match for IPRoyal's $1.57, and floor against floor Webshare still wins.

Both are "from" prices, so quote your own quantity before deciding.

ISP proxies repeat the pattern. Webshare's $0.30 static residential proxy is the shared tier, sold in blocks of 20 for $6 a month.

IPRoyal's $1.80 is a 24-hour rental. A 30-day term starts at $2.70 per proxy, and the IP is yours alone.

IPRoyal sells by the proxy and by the day, which suits a short job on a couple of dedicated IPs. Webshare's shared tier is built for people who want hundreds.

If the two product classes blur together, our explainers on what ISP proxies are and residential vs datacenter proxies cover the mechanics.

When non-expiring traffic beats the lower rate

IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic beats Webshare's lower rate only when you'd use less than half of a Webshare monthly plan.

Webshare's allowance resets at each renewal. IPRoyal's GBs sit in your account until you spend them.

The number to compare is dollars per GB you pushed through the proxy, with unused Webshare traffic counted as waste.

def effective_rate(price_per_gb, gb_bought, gb_used, expires=True):
    """Dollars per GB you pushed through the proxy."""
    paid = price_per_gb * gb_bought
    # unused GBs are lost on an expiring plan, kept on a non-expiring one
    counted = gb_used if expires else gb_bought
    return round(paid / counted, 2)

# 10 GB tier, 4 GB used this month
print(effective_rate(2.75, 10, 4))                 # Webshare: 6.88
print(effective_rate(5.51, 10, 4, expires=False))  # IPRoyal: 5.51

At 4 GB used out of 10, Webshare costs $6.88 per used GB and IPRoyal $5.51. At 5 GB they tie, and above that Webshare pulls ahead with each extra GB.

Plus, Webshare bills monthly with no minimum commitment, so a disciplined buyer can subscribe for the month a job runs and cancel after.

IPRoyal's perk is worth most to people who won't babysit a subscription.

Proxy types: what each one sells

IPRoyal sells four proxy types and Webshare sells three; the one missing at Webshare is mobile.

IPRoyal's mobile proxies start at $10.11 per day. If your target only trusts carrier IPs, the comparison ends here.

Webshare has the only free plan: 10 datacenter proxies with 1 GB of traffic a month, no card required. IPRoyal keeps free trials for companies.

Webshare also sells shared datacenter IPs, which IPRoyal doesn't.

In Proxyway's test against Amazon and Google, that shared pool posted the best success rate of the datacenter group: 79.84% against a 57.46% median.

IPRoyal has a web unblocker and a YouTube scraper API on its menu too. I'm leaving those out, because this comparison is about raw proxies you point your own scraper at.

Pool quality and speed in Proxyway's 2026 benchmark

In Proxyway's 2026 benchmark, Webshare's residential network was faster and connected more reliably, while IPRoyal's IPs were flagged as proxies about half as often.

I haven't run a head-to-head of my own for this piece. These are Proxyway's numbers, collected in March and April 2026 with 3.6 million requests per provider on the global pool.

Read the first four rows with care. The target was a 6 KB page on a CDN that doesn't block requests, so 99.28% describes infrastructure and tells you little about Cloudflare.

IPRoyal's global success rate fell 3.45 points from the year before.

Its global pool also had the lowest share of IPs classed as residential or mobile, 86.77%, though its country-filtered pools all cleared 99%.

The flagged-IP rows point the other way. On targets that score IP reputation, a pool where one address in six is a known proxy should outlast one where it's one in three.

On paper Webshare has the bigger pool, 80M against 64M. Its comparison page still calls that "more than double", a line left over from when IPRoyal advertised 32M.

Sticky sessions and targeting

IPRoyal gives you a timer for sticky sessions, from 1 second up to 7 days.

Webshare holds an IP for as long as the peer stays online, and its one knob is an inactivity threshold.

IPRoyal sets the timer with a _lifetime- flag on the proxy password, per its rotation docs.

A second flag, _killswitch-1, makes the proxy return HTTP 410 when the IP dies. Your login flow fails loudly where it would otherwise carry on from a new address.

Seven days is a ceiling. Residential peers go offline when someone closes a laptop, so for a session that must survive a week, rent a static ISP proxy from either vendor.

On location targeting the two have traded places. Proxyway's spring report logged Webshare at country and city only; Webshare's residential page now lists state, ZIP, and ASN as well.

IPRoyal covers continent, country, state, city, and coordinates, with ASN targeting switched off by default. Check ZIP and ASN on a live plan before you build a local-SEO crawler around either.

Both speak HTTP and SOCKS5, and both accept username:password or an IP whitelist.

Webshare's residential plans block some sites until you pass a short KYC check, and IPRoyal publishes a KYC policy of its own.

Connecting to IPRoyal and Webshare from Python

Both vendors use a standard username:password gateway, so switching between them means changing one URL.

IPRoyal puts targeting flags on the password, and Webshare puts them on the username. Keep credentials in environment variables and build both URLs once.

import os
import requests

env = os.environ
PROXIES = {
    # IPRoyal: flags such as _country-us ride on the password
    "iproyal": f"http://{env['IPROYAL_USER']}:{env['IPROYAL_PASS']}"
               "[email protected]:12321",
    # Webshare: paste the username from its Endpoint Generator,
    # for example myuser-us-city_los_angeles
    "webshare": f"http://{env['WEBSHARE_USER']}:{env['WEBSHARE_PASS']}"
                "@p.webshare.io:80",
}

for name, url in PROXIES.items():
    r = requests.get("https://api.ipify.org?format=json",
                     proxies={"http": url, "https": url}, timeout=30)
    print(name, r.json()["ip"])

Run it and you should see two different exit IPs. If either line throws a 407, check which half of the credential pair your flags are on.

Webshare's datacenter and static plans work differently. You download a proxy list from the dashboard or its API and rotate through it yourself.

How to test IPRoyal and Webshare on your own target

The benchmark that settles this is 200 requests against the page you plan to scrape, through 1 GB from each vendor.

That costs under $11: $7.35 for IPRoyal's pay-as-you-go GB and $3.50 for Webshare's.

This function measures the two things the bill depends on: how many requests come back 200, and how long the good ones take.

import statistics
import time

def bench(proxy_url, target, n=200):
    ok, times = 0, []
    proxies = {"http": proxy_url, "https": proxy_url}
    for _ in range(n):
        start = time.perf_counter()
        try:
            r = requests.get(target, proxies=proxies, timeout=30)
            if r.status_code == 200:
                ok += 1
                times.append(time.perf_counter() - start)
        except requests.RequestException:
            pass  # a failed request counts against the success rate
    median = round(statistics.median(times), 2) if times else None
    return {"success_pct": round(100 * ok / n, 1), "median_s": median}

A 200 doesn't prove you got a good page. If your target serves block pages with a 200, add a check for a string that only the real page contains.

Then turn the result into cost per 1,000 good pages, reusing the PROXIES dict from the previous section.

TARGET = "https://example.com/product/123"  # swap in a page you scrape
RATE_PER_GB = {"iproyal": 5.51, "webshare": 2.75}  # 10 GB tiers, Oct 2026
PAGE_MB = 0.5  # measure your own average response size

for name, url in PROXIES.items():
    result = bench(url, TARGET)
    # failed attempts still burn bandwidth, so divide by the success rate
    attempts = 1000 / (max(result["success_pct"], 1) / 100)
    cost = attempts * PAGE_MB / 1024 * RATE_PER_GB[name]
    print(name, result, f"${cost:.2f} per 1,000 good pages")

Plug in Proxyway's success rates and a 0.5 MB page, and the math gives about $2.80 for IPRoyal and $1.35 for Webshare.

The retries add pennies; nearly all of the difference is the per-GB rate.

Your target can flip that. If Webshare's success rate on a protected site falls below half of IPRoyal's, the cheaper GB stops being cheaper.

For a deeper checklist, including leak and anonymity checks, see our guide on how to test proxies.

When IPRoyal wins

IPRoyal wins when the job is irregular, needs carrier IPs, or needs a session you can time.

• You scrape in bursts and would waste more than half of a monthly plan.
• You need mobile proxies.
• Your flow is multi-step (login, cart, checkout) and you want a session lifetime plus a kill switch.
• Your target scores IP reputation, and a pool flagged half as often matters more to you than 0.4 seconds of latency.
• You pay with crypto or PayPal.

When Webshare wins

Webshare wins when your volume is steady and datacenter or ordinary residential IPs are enough.

• You use most of your allowance each month, which makes residential traffic about half the price.
• Datacenter IPs get through to your target. 100 shared ones cost $2.99.
• You want to test for free before paying anything.
• You need hundreds of static IPs and can live with sharing them at $0.30 each.

IPRoyal vs Webshare: the verdict

For most scraping workloads Webshare is the cheaper choice, and it's where I'd start.

Begin with its free datacenter proxies. If the target blocks them, buy 1 GB of residential and run the test above before committing to a bigger plan.

Pick IPRoyal when the workload matches one of its strengths: irregular traffic, mobile IPs, or long timed sessions. Paying double per GB is fine when the alternative is traffic that expires unused.

What neither one fixes

Neither proxy network fixes a scraper that announces itself. A clean residential IP paired with a Python TLS fingerprint and bare headers still gets a 403 from Cloudflare or DataDome.

If both vendors fail your test at similar rates, the client is the likely cause. Fix it first, then rerun.

FAQ

Is IPRoyal better than Webshare?

IPRoyal is better than Webshare for irregular usage, mobile proxies, and timed sticky sessions. Webshare is better on price, speed, and free testing. In Proxyway's 2026 benchmark Webshare connected 99.28% of the time against IPRoyal's 96.11%.

Does Webshare have mobile proxies?

No, Webshare doesn't sell mobile proxies. Its lineup is datacenter, static residential (ISP), and rotating residential. IPRoyal sells mobile proxies from $10.11 per day.

Does IPRoyal have a free trial?

No, IPRoyal has no free plan or free trial for individual users. The cheapest way in is 1 GB of pay-as-you-go residential traffic for $7.35, which never expires. Webshare has a permanent free plan with 10 datacenter proxies.

Who owns Webshare?

Oxylabs owns Webshare. Proxyway's 2026 Proxy Market Research lists Webshare as acquired by Oxylabs in 2022 and says Oxylabs likely supplies its residential IPs. IPRoyal is independent and runs its own pool through the Pawns app.

Can you use IPRoyal and Webshare together?

Yes, and it's a sensible setup. Both use standard username:password gateways, so one scraper can route easy targets through Webshare's datacenter IPs and send login flows or mobile-only targets through IPRoyal.

Wrapping up

Put both price lists in the same units and Webshare costs about half of IPRoyal for residential traffic you use within the month.

IPRoyal earns its premium on traffic you'd otherwise lose, on mobile IPs, and on timed sessions.

Spend the $11 on 1 GB from each and run the script against your real target before buying a bigger plan.

If neither fits, we've ranked more options in the best Webshare alternatives.