When you should stay with IPRoyal: its strengths
IPRoyal has been trading since 2018 and occupies the mid-market: cheaper and far more self-serve than the enterprise data platforms, but with a much wider catalogue than a single-product provider. Most of its reputation rests on two things — the pay-as-you-go residential model with traffic that does not expire, and the fact that you can buy almost every proxy category from one dashboard and one wallet.
It is also one of the more transparent providers on where its residential addresses come from. IPRoyal runs its own consumer bandwidth-sharing application, Pawns.app, alongside partner supply, and publishes documentation on how consent and opt-out work. If your compliance team asks a sourcing question, there is a document to hand them. That is not universal in this market and it is a legitimate reason to stay.
Session handling is another area where IPRoyal is ahead of most of the field: sticky sessions run considerably longer than the industry norm, sitting in the multi-day range rather than the multi-hour one, with manual rotation and configurable auto-rotation intervals on top.
- One account covering residential, ISP/static residential, datacenter and mobile
- Managed layers on top of raw proxies — automated unblocking billed per request, plus scraper APIs
- Published residential sourcing documentation tied to a first-party supply app
- Very long sticky sessions, well beyond a single working day
- 24/7 support across live chat, email and Discord
IPRoyal vs Nefo: scope, targeting and sticky sessions
The structural difference is scope. IPRoyal is a catalogue: static ISP addresses, datacenter blocks, mobile in both dedicated and per-gigabyte rotating forms, a request-billed unblocking layer, and scraper APIs. Nefo now covers more categories than it used to — residential bandwidth, 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, datacenter proxies, static IP proxies, IP Vault addresses for keeping a residential or mobile IP, servers and marketplace APIs — and static residential ISP IPs (24 countries, 7 to 360 days), but it still has no unblocker or managed scraping product. For a team that only ever used Royal Residential, that missing surface is irrelevant. For a team whose stack leans on automated unblocking, it is disqualifying.
The second difference is where advanced targeting sits. Nefo exposes ASN/ISP targeting — pinning traffic to a named cable, fibre or mobile carrier within a country — on any account, alongside state or region and city selection in most countries. On larger platforms, carrier-level filtering has more often been positioned as a higher-tier or enterprise feature, so it is worth checking what your current plan actually includes before you compare like for like.
The third difference runs the other way, and it is a real limitation rather than a footnote. Nefo's sticky sessions hold an IP from one minute up to roughly 24 hours. IPRoyal's run considerably longer. If you depend on a single residential identity persisting across several days, Nefo will not reproduce that.
- Nefo sells static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries, rented for 7 to 360 days
- Nefo has no unblocking service or scraper API — you bring your own client, headers and challenge handling
- Nefo's sticky ceiling is about 24 hours; IPRoyal's is measurably longer
- ASN/carrier targeting is available on any Nefo account, not gated behind a tier
- Both are self-serve; neither requires a sales call to start
How Nefo residential and mobile proxies work
Residential works as prepaid bandwidth. You buy a balance from 5GB upwards, generate as many credentials as you want for free, and each credential carries its own configuration: HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, username and password or IP allowlist authentication, a target country from 195+ available, optionally a state, city or an ASN, and either per-request rotation or a sticky window between one minute and 24 hours. Nothing is consumed until traffic flows, so you can keep a dozen credentials for different jobs without paying to hold them. Per-gigabyte rates step down with volume, and the flexible plans do not expire.
Mobile is a different shape and worth understanding before you compare it to IPRoyal's mobile products. Nefo rents 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems by duration — hours to 30 days — rather than by gigabyte. One live carrier IP per port, changed on demand or held, with US state and carrier targeting and tiers separated by bandwidth ceiling and country coverage. That maps onto IPRoyal's time-rented mobile ports reasonably well; for long-held single-IP work, Nefo's closest substitute is IP Vault rather than a per-gigabyte rotating mobile pool.
Usage is visible in the dashboard and exportable, which matters if you are reconciling spend against jobs rather than trusting a single monthly figure.
- Credentials are free to generate; only traffic draws down the balance
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, username/password or IP allowlist
- Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to 24 hours, set per credential
- 227 countries; state, city and ASN/ISP within a country
- Mobile ports billed per duration, not per gigabyte
How to test a switch from IPRoyal to Nefo
There is no migration event, because there is nothing to migrate. Residential proxy access is a hostname, a port and a credential pair. You generate a Nefo credential with the same country and session behaviour your IPRoyal credential had, point one worker at it, and compare success rate, latency and gigabytes burned per thousand successful requests on your own targets. That last metric is the one that decides it — a lower headline rate per gigabyte is meaningless if retries eat the difference.
The one thing that does not transfer cleanly is session syntax. Providers encode rotation and session identifiers differently, and some of what IPRoyal expresses through username parameters is set at credential-generation time on Nefo instead. Budget an hour for that, not a sprint.
Because IPRoyal traffic does not expire, there is no deadline forcing the decision and no stranded balance. Run both, send a slice of production traffic to each for a week or two, and let the numbers close the question. If Nefo loses on your targets, you have lost the cost of a small prepaid top-up.
Who should stay with IPRoyal and who should move
Stay with IPRoyal if you rely on the parts Nefo still does not offer. If your workflow depends on request-billed unblocking so you do not have to maintain fingerprint and challenge logic yourself, or residential sessions that survive for days rather than hours, consolidating onto Nefo is not possible without changing how the stack works. Stay too if your compliance process is already built around IPRoyal's published sourcing documentation and you have no appetite to redo that review.
Nefo makes sense in the more focused self-serve case: residential bandwidth and, optionally, mobile ports on real carrier modems, datacenter proxies, static IPs or IP Vault addresses bought without a sales process, with carrier-level targeting available without negotiating a tier, and a product surface that is still simpler than a full managed platform. Teams that only ever bought Royal Residential, and who find themselves configuring around a catalogue they do not use, are the ones with something to gain.
Both are self-serve and both start small, which means this is a testable question rather than a judgement call. Nobody has to take either vendor's word for it.
Frequently asked questions
Sometimes, so do not decide on the headline number. Nefo's residential rates step down from $0.90/GB on 5 GB to $0.53/GB at 10 TB. IPRoyal's effective rate depends on your tier and any promotion, so compare on the same day and volume. Cost per thousand successful requests matters most. See pricing.
No. IPRoyal's residential traffic does not expire, so an unused balance stays whether or not you use it. Split a slice of production traffic between both for a week, compare success rate and gigabytes burned, then shift the rest only if the numbers hold.
No. Nefo's sticky sessions run from 1 minute to approximately 24 hours per credential. IPRoyal's run considerably longer. If you need one residential identity across several days, that is a genuine reason to stay with IPRoyal.
No. Nefo sells network access, not a managed collection layer, so you supply the client, headers, fingerprinting and challenge handling. If you rely on a request-billed unblocker, replacing it with raw proxies is an engineering cost to count against any saving.
Very little. Both use HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 with username and password (Nefo also supports an IP allowlist), so the endpoint and credential strings change. The exception is session control: on Nefo, country, ASN, protocol and rotating-versus-sticky behavior are fixed when you generate the credential.
Only for port rental. Nefo rents 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems by duration, hours to 30 days, with one carrier IP you hold or change on demand. There is no per-GB rotating mobile pool, so if you use that, it is not a swap. See mobile proxies.