What ProxyEmpire is built around: a wide catalogue
ProxyEmpire's defining trait is catalogue breadth rather than a single specialism. It sells rotating residential, static residential (ISP addresses, billed per IP on top of data), rotating mobile, 4G/5G mobile, rotating datacenter, and fixed-price unlimited residential plans from one account. Residential targeting by country, region or state, city and ISP is standard rather than a paid add-on, and the network speaks HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. Around that sit a public API with an endpoint generator, a browser extension, a mobile app, team access with roles, and account managers at the enterprise end.
Its public reputation is good, and support responsiveness is the thing customers mention most often. The company is a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative and publishes sourcing commitments accordingly. Independent testing has generally found high request success rates paired with middling latency compared with the fastest networks. The recurring criticisms are price relative to budget-tier vendors, thin documentation, and a dashboard that offers limited control over credentials and sub-users.
None of that is a reason to leave. If you are running steady monthly volume across several proxy types and you value one vendor and one invoice, ProxyEmpire is doing the job it was designed for.
- Rotating residential, static residential (ISP), rotating mobile, 4G/5G mobile, rotating datacenter, unlimited residential
- Country, region/state, city and ISP targeting included with the residential product
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5
- Public API, browser extension, mobile app, role-based team access
- Monthly subscription billing with unused data rolling over between periods
ProxyEmpire monthly plan vs prepaid balance
This is the real structural difference, and it is not about features. ProxyEmpire's commercial model is a subscription: you pick a plan, you are charged on the same day each month, and unused data rolls over into the next period instead of being forfeited. Rollover removes the worst penalty of subscription billing — you do not lose what you paid for — but it does not remove the cycle. The charge recurs until you cancel, and payments are non-refundable, which is why a low-cost trial exists as the evaluation route.
Nefo has no cycle at all. You buy a bandwidth package, it sits in the account as a balance, and flexible plans are non-expiring: it stays there until traffic consumes it. The smallest package is 5GB ($4.50). There is no renewal date, no cancellation step, and a month in which you scrape nothing costs nothing.
Which model is better depends entirely on the shape of your load, not on which vendor you prefer. Predictable, level monthly volume is well served by a subscription with rollover, and at that point the committed per-GB rate is the only number that matters. Bursty work — a seasonal price-monitoring run, a client project with a defined end, a quarterly audit — maps badly onto a recurring charge and well onto a balance that waits.
What Nefo does not replace from ProxyEmpire
Nefo no longer stops at two products: alongside residential bandwidth and 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, it also sells datacenter proxies, static IP proxies, and IP Vault addresses for longer-held residential or mobile IPs. It also sells static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries. What it does not sell is a fixed-price unlimited residential plan: rotating residential is billed per gigabyte. If ProxyEmpire is currently your single vendor across several proxy types, moving to Nefo may still mean confirming that Nefo's 24 static ISP countries and rental terms fit, or staying where you are.
That is a genuine reason to stay, not a hedge. Static residential ISP IPs are available here in 24 countries from $1.76 for 7 days, but a fixed-price unlimited plan has no direct equivalent. If your workflow depends on holding one residential IP for weeks, check those countries and terms first.
- Stay with ProxyEmpire if consolidating everything under one vendor and one contract is worth more than the billing model
- Stay if you need static ISP addresses outside Nefo's 24 countries
- Stay if a fixed-price unlimited residential plan is cheaper than metered traffic at your volume
- Stay if consolidating everything under one vendor and one contract is worth more than the billing model
How Nefo residential proxies are configured
Credentials are generated in the dashboard, and generating them is free — only traffic through them draws down the balance, so there is no cost to spinning up a separate credential per project, per target or per team member. Each credential is a fixed set of choices: protocol, geography, and session behaviour. Every protocol authenticates with username and password.
Targeting covers 227 countries and territories. The United States goes down to state and city level; selected countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France resolve to region and city. ASN and ISP targeting is available paired with a country, so you can pin traffic to a particular cable, fibre or mobile carrier network where the destination site treats operators differently.
Sessions are set per credential rather than negotiated per request. Rotating gives a new IP on every request, which suits wide distributed collection. Sticky holds the same IP anywhere from one minute to 24 hours, which is what multi-step flows, logins and checkout paths need. Usage is tracked in the dashboard and credential lists can be exported as CSV for handing to a scraper config.
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, all with username/password authentication
- 227 countries and territories; US state and city; region and city in selected countries
- ASN/ISP targeting paired with a country
- Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Credential generation is free; only traffic consumes bandwidth
Mobile proxies: different rental terms
Both vendors sell mobile, but the billing units differ enough to change which one is cheaper for you. ProxyEmpire offers rotating mobile metered per GB alongside dedicated 4G ports, so light or occasional mobile traffic can be bought in small amounts. Nefo sells carrier-modem ports only, rented by duration — hours up to 30 days — rather than by the gigabyte.
A Nefo mobile port gives you one live rotating 4G/5G IP that you hold or change on demand, at a fixed line rate depending on tier, with US state- and carrier-level targeting available. Because it is time-rented, a port running flat out costs the same as one sitting idle. That is good value for sustained work on a held identity and poor value if you need a few hundred megabytes of mobile traffic once a month, where a metered rotating mobile product is the better fit.
How to switch from ProxyEmpire to Nefo
Migration is mostly mechanical. Both sides authenticate with username and password, so the proxy strings in your code change but the mechanism does not. What does not transfer cleanly is geo syntax: ProxyEmpire encodes targeting into the credential string in its own format, so rebuild the targeting with Nefo's username tokens, such as -country-us, -city-losangeles and -session-<id>, rather than translating strings character by character. Map each of your existing session lifetimes onto the 1-minute-to-24-hour sticky range.
Run the two in parallel before you move load. A 5GB package is enough to put the same targets through both networks and compare block rates and latency on your own sites, which is the only comparison that means anything. Keep the ProxyEmpire subscription alive through the overlap; because payments are non-refundable, cancellation timing relative to the billing date is the only lever you have, so plan the switch to land just after a cycle closes rather than just after it renews.
- Inventory your current credentials: protocol, geography, session length, and which job uses each
- Rebuild targeting in the Nefo generator instead of editing endpoint strings
- Recreate sticky sessions as per-credential durations between 1 minute and 24 hours
- Run 5GB against your real targets in parallel and compare block rates yourself
- Cancel ProxyEmpire only after a full cycle of your own workload has run, timed to the billing date
Frequently asked questions
It depends on how steady your usage is. Nefo residential runs from $0.90/GB at 5 GB to $0.53/GB at 10 TB with no recurring charge, while ProxyEmpire's plans recur monthly until you cancel. Low or uneven usage suits prepaid; a fixed-price unlimited plan may win at very high volume. See pricing.
There is nothing to roll over from, because Nefo has no billing period. ProxyEmpire's rollover stops a monthly allowance being forfeited. Nefo bandwidth simply stays on the balance until traffic uses it, whether that takes a week or a year, and no recurring charge keeps it alive.
Yes. Neither is exclusive and no contract prevents it. Nefo also sells datacenter proxies, static datacenter IPs and static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries, so you can move only the parts that fit better here and leave the rest.
Country targeting will, across 227 countries and territories. City and ISP depth depends on the market: Nefo lists 22,417 cities and 14,252 ISPs/ASNs, targeted through username tokens like -country-us and -city-losangeles. Rebuild your targeting rather than porting endpoint strings, and verify your key cities first.
Yes. Residential proxies work over HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. Sessions either rotate on every request or stay sticky for anything from 1 minute to 24 hours. Map each of your current session lifetimes onto that range when you move.
5 GB for $4.50, bought outright with no subscription and no expiry. Credentials are free, so only traffic counts. That is enough to run your real targets and measure block rates, which tells you more than any published success-rate figure.