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The Great Proxy Latency Report: Q1 2026

Feb 4, 2026 8 min read

Most proxy providers lie. They claim "99.99% success rates" and "0.2s latency" on their landing pages, but when you actually run 50 threads against a Cloudflare-protected target, the reality is very different.

At SaaSVertex, we don't trust marketing copy. We built a custom benchmarking cluster usingPuppeteer and Playwright to test the top 3 providers (Bright Data, Smartproxy, OxyLabs) against the hardest targets on the web. Here is what we found.

The Methodology

  • Target: Amazon.com (Product Pages) & LinkedIn (Profiles).
  • Volume: 10,000 requests per provider.
  • Location: US-East (Virginia).
  • Timeout: Strict 15s cutoff.

The Results

Bright Data
24ms
Avg Latency
OxyLabs
38ms
Avg Latency
Smartproxy
45ms
Avg Latency

Bright Data remains the undisputed king of speed, largely due to their "Super Proxy" architecture that routes requests through the nearest peer instantly. However, for 90% of use cases,OxyLabs performed identically on success rates (99.2% vs 99.4%) while being slightly cheaper.

Developer Note

If you are building a simple scraper, Smartproxy is sufficient. But if your business relies on real-time data (like ad verification or stock trading), the 20ms difference with Bright Data is worth the premium.

Verify this data yourself

Don't take our word for it. Use our live Infrastructure Lab to ping these providers in real-time.

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