Rotating pool or fixed address?
These are opposite requirements and picking the wrong one wastes a procurement cycle, so name yours first.
A rotating pool: you are collecting public web data at scale — prices, availability, search results, listings — and the sites you read will block a single address quickly. You want many addresses, distributed across countries and networks, and you want them to look like ordinary consumer connections. That is Oxylabs, Decodo, SOAX, Zyte and Apify.
A fixed address: you are calling somebody else's API and they will only accept traffic from addresses they have allow-listed. You want one stable IP that never changes. That is OutboundGateway.
No product does both well, because the two requirements are exact opposites: one is defined by variety, the other by never varying.
What are the different proxy types actually for?
Four types appear across these providers and the differences decide whether the work succeeds.
Residential proxies route through real consumer connections, so requests look like an ordinary person browsing. That is what gets through on sites that block obvious datacentre traffic, and every provider here except OutboundGateway offers them.
Datacentre proxies come from server hosting, which makes them faster and cheaper and easier to detect. Fine for targets that do not care, wasteful for targets that do. Oxylabs and Apify both carry them alongside residential.
Mobile proxies route through mobile carrier networks, the hardest type to block because thousands of real users share the same carrier address — Decodo and SOAX both offer them. ISP proxies, which SOAX also carries, sit in between: datacentre speed on addresses registered to consumer ISPs.
Where does the proxy stop and the platform start?
Three of these providers sell more than addresses, and for most teams that is the part worth paying for.
Zyte builds around smart proxy management rather than raw proxies: its Smart Proxy Manager and Zyte API handle rotation, retries and anti-ban behaviour automatically, so you stop maintaining the logic that decides which address to use next and what to do when a request is refused. Zyte also maintains Scrapy, the open-source framework much of this industry runs on.
Apify goes further and sells the automation as well as the network: scraping Actors are runnable, shareable scrapers on a developer platform, with datacentre and residential proxies underneath. For a team that would otherwise build and host its own scrapers, that is the whole stack.
Oxylabs sits at the enterprise end with Web Scraper API alongside the network, and Decodo pairs scraping APIs with a dashboard aimed at getting a small team running quickly rather than at procurement.
What does a fixed European egress IP solve?
The moment a partner asks which addresses your requests will come from and you cannot answer.
Cloud applications send outbound requests from whatever IP the hosting provider assigns, and it changes without warning — on a restart, a scaling event, a region move. Dynamic addresses make an allow-list impossible to honour, and the failure is nasty because it works until it silently does not.
OutboundGateway routes outbound traffic through one stable dedicated address. You hand that IP to the bank, the payment provider or the enterprise partner, they allow-list it, and the integration survives changes to your own infrastructure. It is EU-native, so the outbound leg exits from European infrastructure rather than through a US proxy — the last hop a European stack usually forgets.
It is a single-purpose service. Its value is entirely a function of whether you have that specific requirement, and it is worth checking the SLA, redundancy and throughput before putting a production integration behind it.
What is legal and what is not?
Worth being precise, because this category attracts a reputation it does not entirely deserve.
Collecting publicly accessible data is broadly lawful in Europe, and it is how price comparison, market research, brand protection and academic research have always worked. What changes the answer is the data and the method: personal data pulls in GDPR regardless of whether it was public, terms of service create contractual obligations that a court may or may not enforce, and rate limits that degrade a site's service for its actual users are a separate problem from the legal one.
The reputable providers here are explicit about this. Enterprise proxy networks operate compliance and know-your-customer processes precisely because their networks can be misused, and the difference between a vendor that asks what you are doing and one that does not is the clearest quality signal in the category.
The residential networks raise a second question worth asking your provider directly: where the consumer IPs come from, and whether the people whose connections carry your traffic consented knowingly. Ask it before you sign, not after.
