Best 4G Mobile Proxy Providers in 2026: Honest Comparison

There are well over a hundred companies selling “mobile proxies” today, and most of their landing pages look identical: same ASN screenshots, same “millions of IPs” claims, same vague pricing. Choosing between them is genuinely hard — and getting it wrong costs you either money (overpaying for capacity you don’t need) or accounts (cheap IPs that get your Instagram or scraper banned within a week).

So we did the work for you. Over the past six weeks we tested five of the most-discussed 4G mobile proxy providers on real targets (Instagram, Google SERPs, Cloudflare-protected e-commerce, sneaker drops) with our own scripts and our own credit card. This article is the honest write-up — including where competitors are genuinely better than us, and where they aren’t. We make HexaProxy, so we have a bias. We’ve tried to flag it whenever it matters.

If you’re new to the category, start with what a 4G mobile proxy actually is and how it compares to residential proxies before reading on.

At-a-glance comparison

Provider	Primary carriers	Entry pricing	IP rotation control	Verdict
HexaProxy	Orange, SFR, Bouygues, Free (FR)	€49.90 / month per proxy	Per-request or natural carrier rotation	Best for French targets, ad warm-up, Instagram
OxyLabs Mobile	T-Mobile, Vodafone, multi-country	$400 / month minimum	Time-based + per-request	Best for enterprise scraping in US/UK/DE
IPRoyal Mobile	Mixed Tier-1 carriers, global	$4.00–$7.00 / GB	Per-request + 10-min “session”	Best for budget testing and short bursts
Soax Mobile	UK + EU mobile, mixed pool	~$99 / month entry	Per-request + session pinning	Best for blended residential+mobile workloads
BrightData Mobile	Largest global pool, 70M+ IPs	$499 / month minimum	Granular API rotation	Best for enterprise-scale, complex geo needs

A few notes before the reviews:

“Rotation control” means what you, the buyer, can ask the provider to do. None of these providers — including us — can override what the mobile carrier itself decides. Mobile IPs are assigned via CGNAT by Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, etc., and they change when the carrier decides. The provider chooses how often to intentionally refresh; the carrier chooses everything else.
Pricing is the lowest realistic monthly bill, not the marketing headline. “From $1.50/GB” usually means $200/month committed.
All tests were run between 2026-03-15 and 2026-04-25 from a single VPS in Paris, then cross-checked from a second VPS in Frankfurt.

#1 HexaProxy — Best for French-market work, ad warm-up, Instagram

Headline: Real Orange / SFR / Bouygues / Free SIMs in France. Built specifically for use cases where carrier-side IP persistence matters more than raw global coverage.

Where it wins. HexaProxy is a focused product. We operate physical phones with physical SIM cards on French mobile networks — primarily Orange (gold-standard IP persistence in France), with rotating capacity on SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and Free Mobile. For anything targeting French SERPs, French e-commerce (Cdiscount, Vinted, Leboncoin, La Redoute), or French ad inventory, the IPs look exactly like real French smartphone users because they are real French smartphone users’ traffic class. Latency to French targets sits around 120–150 ms in our tests, which is normal for 4G.

The use case where HexaProxy genuinely outperforms larger global providers is Instagram and Meta ad-account warm-up. Orange IPs in particular tend to persist naturally for multiple days without involuntary reassignment — not because we “lock” them (we can’t, no one can), but because Orange’s CGNAT pool behavior is unusually stable. That natural persistence is what warm-up workflows actually need. We never describe this as a sticky session controlled on our end; it’s carrier-side natural persistence, and Orange happens to be the most stable operator in our fleet.

Where it loses. If you need US, German, UK, or Asian IPs, we’re not your provider. We don’t have SIMs there. If you need a 100M+ IP pool for global scraping, we’re not your provider either — our pool is sized in the low thousands, not millions. And if you want a polished dashboard with click-through analytics charts, we’re more API-and-text than UI sugar.

Pricing. Per-proxy, €49.90/month entry with unlimited bandwidth, and short-term options at €5/day or €20/week with no commitment — handy when you just want to test the stack before going monthly. No GB metering, no surprise overages, stacking discounts as you add ports. See pricing details. For full context on why we built it this way for the French market, read our French-language guide on proxy mobile 4G France.

#2 OxyLabs Mobile — Best for enterprise scraping in US/UK/DE

Headline: Mature, expensive, and excellent if your scraping volume justifies it.

Where it wins. OxyLabs has been operating since 2015 and it shows. The dashboard is the most polished in this comparison: real-time usage analytics, per-target success-rate breakdowns, proxy lists exportable as CSV, and a working API for everything. Their mobile pool covers the US (T-Mobile, AT&T), the UK, Germany, and a handful of other Tier-1 countries with city-level targeting that actually works — request a Manhattan IP and you get a Manhattan IP, not “somewhere on the US East Coast.”

Their Mobile product is rotating-only by default with optional time-based session retention (1, 10, or 30 minutes, with the same carrier-side caveat that applies to everyone — the operator can still reassign you mid-window). Latency from Paris to US mobile endpoints landed around 200–250 ms in our tests; from Frankfurt to UK endpoints, around 130–170 ms.

Their support is fast (sub-hour replies during business hours), their documentation is thorough, and their compliance posture is enterprise-grade. If your buyer needs SOC 2 and a procurement-friendly contract, OxyLabs is one of the few providers who can sign one.

Where it loses. The pricing floor is high. The cheapest serious plan is around $400/month committed, and traffic is metered per-GB. If you’re an individual freelancer or a small SEO shop, the unit economics rarely work. OxyLabs is also more general-purpose than specialist — they don’t have the carrier-specific depth in any one country that a focused provider has.

Pricing. Roughly $4–$6 per GB on standard plans, with steep volume discounts. Trial available on request, not self-serve.

#3 IPRoyal Mobile — Best for budget testing and short bursts

Headline: The cheapest credible name in mobile proxies, with the trade-offs you’d expect.

Where it wins. IPRoyal’s mobile product is the entry point most people should test first when budget is the constraint. Pricing starts around $4/GB with no monthly commitment, the signup is fully self-serve, and you can be running requests through their mobile pool within fifteen minutes of paying. For small-scale scraping, short-term campaigns, or proof-of-concept work, this is hard to beat.

The pool is smaller than the giants — IPRoyal doesn’t publish exact numbers, but our IP-diversity test (10,000 rotated requests) returned around 1,800 unique IPs across their mobile pool, versus tens of thousands for OxyLabs and BrightData. For low-volume work, that’s plenty. For aggressive scraping where you want each request to look unrelated, it isn’t.

Latency was reasonable in our tests (150–200 ms to European targets) and the rotating endpoint was reliable — fewer than 0.5% of requests failed at the proxy layer.

Where it loses. Carrier transparency is limited. IPRoyal aggregates capacity from multiple sources and doesn’t always disclose which specific carrier you’re routing through on a given request. For use cases where the carrier identity matters (French SERPs, Instagram in a specific country), that’s a problem. Support is responsive but not deeply technical — fine for standard issues, less useful for unusual integration questions.

Pricing. Pay-as-you-go from $4/GB, with monthly bundles down to roughly $2.80/GB at higher volumes. No annual lock-in required.

#4 Soax — Best for blended residential + mobile workloads

Headline: A solid generalist with British heritage and an unusual residential+mobile blended approach.

Where it wins. Soax originated in the UK residential proxy world and expanded into mobile, and the mobile product reflects that DNA — it’s tightly integrated with their residential pool, which is genuinely useful when your workflow needs both. Their dashboard lets you switch a target between residential and mobile routing without changing endpoints, which simplifies code paths.

Country and city targeting works well across most of Europe, with the UK as the obvious strength. Their session pinning lets you request that traffic stick to one IP for up to 30 minutes (carrier permitting — again, no provider can override an involuntary CGNAT reassignment). For multi-step workflows that need a stable IP for login → action → logout, this is one of the cleaner implementations.

Latency from Paris to UK targets was around 140–180 ms in our tests, with very low error rates at the proxy layer.

Where it loses. Pricing is mid-tier without being especially competitive. Their cheapest mobile-only entry sits around $99/month for relatively modest bandwidth, and per-GB costs ramp quickly. For pure mobile scraping at volume, OxyLabs or BrightData generally cost less per useful request. For pure French targeting, a France-focused specialist like us will give you better carrier depth.

Their support is professional but follows business hours strictly — out-of-hours issues wait until the UK working day resumes.

Pricing. Around $99/month entry for mobile, scaling on GB used. Free trial available with a credit card hold.

#5 BrightData Mobile — Best for enterprise scale and complex geographies

Headline: The biggest player. Most coverage, most features, most complexity, biggest invoice.

Where it wins. BrightData (formerly Luminati) operates the largest publicly claimed mobile IP pool in the industry — 70M+ across their full network, with mobile-specific capacity in essentially every country where 4G exists. If your use case is “I need to appear as a real mobile user in 40+ countries with carrier-level filtering,” BrightData is the only credible answer.

Their proxy manager tool is genuinely impressive: programmable rotation rules, per-target routing, session persistence configurable per-request, real-time IP swap on failure, and a logging layer that gives you full request-level telemetry. For data teams running serious extraction pipelines, this kind of tooling pays for itself.

Compliance and contracts are enterprise-grade — they’re one of the few proxy companies you can plug into a procurement process and come out the other side with a signed MSA.

Where it loses. Complexity. BrightData’s product surface is enormous, and the learning curve is steep. The setup that “just works” on simpler providers requires you to read documentation and tune zone configurations on BrightData. Pricing starts around $499/month committed and grows fast — per-GB rates can exceed $15 on standard plans.

For small or focused use cases, BrightData is overkill. If you need French mobile IPs to warm up a handful of Instagram accounts, you’ll pay 10x what a specialist charges, and the extra capability buys you nothing useful.

Pricing. $499/month entry, $8–$15/GB on standard tiers, lower with volume commits.

How we tested

Methodology, because every “comparison” article should publish it.

Test window: 2026-03-15 to 2026-04-25 (six weeks).

Vantage points: Two VPSs — one in Paris (OVH), one in Frankfurt (Hetzner) — running identical Python 3.12 / httpx test scripts.

What we measured:

Latency. 500 sequential GET requests through each provider’s rotating endpoint to a low-overhead target (ipinfo.io/json). We report median values; tails were similar across providers.
IP diversity. 10,000 rotated requests, counting unique IPs returned.
Carrier verification. Spot-checked 200 IPs per provider against ipinfo.io and ipqualityscore.com to confirm the ASN matched what the provider claimed.
Real-target success rate. 1,000 requests each against four real targets: a Cloudflare-protected French e-commerce site, Google SERPs (FR), Instagram profile pages, and a Datadome-protected sneaker site. We counted soft blocks (CAPTCHA, JS challenge) and hard blocks (403, 429) as failures.
Carrier-side IP persistence. For each provider, we held a single proxy session open and ran one request per minute for 12 hours, logging when the carrier-assigned IP changed without us asking for rotation.

What we did not test: US-specific anti-bot stacks (we don’t have meaningful US scraping volume to test fairly), and CAPTCHA-solving integrations (out of scope).

We do not publish granular numerical results per provider — sharing competitors’ success rates against named targets isn’t useful and risks misleading readers about what their use case will look like. The qualitative findings above reflect what we observed; your results will depend on your targets, headers, and pacing. For background on why mobile IPs behave differently than residential IPs in these tests, see our breakdown of mobile proxy vs residential proxy.

Which provider for which use case

A short routing guide, because “the best provider” depends entirely on what you’re doing.

Instagram / Meta ad-account warm-up (French audience) → HexaProxy on Orange. Carrier-side IP persistence on Orange is the most stable in our fleet, which is what warm-up genuinely needs. Don’t trust any provider claiming to “lock” an IP — pick the carrier with the longest natural persistence instead.
Instagram warm-up (US/UK/DE audience) → OxyLabs Mobile or BrightData Mobile. Pick OxyLabs for simpler setup, BrightData for tighter geo control.
High-volume global scraping (10M+ requests/month) → BrightData Mobile or Soax. BrightData wins on scale and tooling; Soax wins on cost if you don’t need the long tail of small countries.
French SERP monitoring, French e-commerce scraping → HexaProxy. Real French carrier IPs are the only thing that matches what French anti-bot systems expect from genuine French users. More context in our French market deep-dive.
Budget testing, short campaigns, learning the category → IPRoyal Mobile. Cheapest credible entry point, no commitment, fast signup.
Procurement-bound enterprise buyer needing SOC 2 + MSA → OxyLabs or BrightData. They are the two providers in this list whose paperwork survives a corporate procurement review.
Sneaker copping / drop sites → HexaProxy or BrightData. Both have the carrier-side IP profile these sites require. Avoid datacenter-blended pools.
Web scraping with Python or Node.js, mixed targets → Start with IPRoyal for testing, graduate to OxyLabs once volume is real. See what is a 4G mobile proxy for integration patterns.

FAQ

Which 4G mobile proxy provider is best in 2026?

There is no single best — it depends on geography and use case. For French targets, ad warm-up, and Instagram on a French audience, HexaProxy is purpose-built. For high-volume global scraping with enterprise tooling, BrightData Mobile is the most capable. For US/UK/DE enterprise scraping with a mature dashboard, OxyLabs Mobile is the strongest mid-to-high end pick. For budget testing, IPRoyal Mobile is the cheapest credible option.

Can a 4G proxy provider really guarantee a sticky IP?

No, and you should be skeptical of anyone who claims they can. Mobile IPs are assigned via CGNAT by the carrier (Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, etc.). The carrier can reassign your IP at any time — during cell handoff, after a session refresh, or when the DHCP pool cycles — and no provider can override that. What providers can do is avoid forcing unnecessary rotations and select carriers with naturally long IP persistence. Orange in France is the gold standard for this; IPs there often persist for multiple days without involuntary change. That’s carrier-side natural persistence, not a provider-controlled sticky session.

How much do real 4G mobile proxies cost in 2026?

Realistic floor pricing in 2026: around €40–55/month per proxy with unlimited bandwidth from focused specialists like HexaProxy (entry plan €49.90/month, short-term €5/day or €20/week); $99–500/month for credible mid-tier providers like Soax and OxyLabs; $499+/month for enterprise tools like BrightData. Pay-as-you-go starts around $4/GB on IPRoyal. Anyone offering “unlimited mobile proxies” for $5–10/month is reselling datacenter IPs labeled as mobile.

How do I verify a provider’s IPs are actually mobile?

Route a request through their proxy and check the result on ipinfo.io. The org field should show a real mobile carrier (Orange S.A., T-Mobile USA, Vodafone, etc.) with a mobile ASN. If it shows a hosting company (OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean) or a residential ISP, the IPs are not mobile regardless of marketing claims.

What latency should I expect from a 4G mobile proxy?

Around 120–200 ms is normal for 4G proxies in 2026. Datacenter proxies are faster, but they’re trivially detected and blocked by serious anti-bot systems. If a provider claims sub-50 ms latency on mobile proxies, they’re either measuring incorrectly or routing you through datacenter infrastructure with mobile-ASN window dressing. Real mobile networks have inherent radio latency that no provider can eliminate.

Is HexaProxy biased in this comparison since you make it?

Yes. We are not a neutral reviewer of our own product. We’ve tried to be honest about where competitors are genuinely better — OxyLabs has a more mature dashboard, BrightData has a vastly larger global pool, IPRoyal is cheaper for testing, Soax handles blended workloads more cleanly. Where we claim HexaProxy wins (French carrier depth, Orange IP persistence, ad warm-up), we believe it based on our own usage and customer feedback, but you should verify with your own targets before committing.

Try HexaProxy free for 24 hours

If your work touches French audiences — French SERPs, French e-commerce, Instagram with a French follower base, ad accounts with French geo-targeting — there’s no faster way to know whether we’re the right fit than to try it. We offer a free 24-hour trial with full access to our Orange / SFR / Bouygues / Free pool, no credit card stored after the trial ends.

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Questions before signing up? See our pricing or chat with us on WhatsApp: Contact HexaProxy.