SparkProxy vs Webshare: Datacenter Proxy Plans Side by Side

Start here. Find the row that matches your constraint, not your budget.

If two rows apply and point in different directions, the bandwidth row usually decides it, because it is the one that fails without warning. More on that below.

Webshare sells addresses. You choose how many proxies you want, whether they are shared, private or dedicated, how much monthly bandwidth the plan carries, and how many concurrent requests the account may open. Each of those is priced separately. Webshare's proxy server page defines the tiers precisely: shared proxies are used by multiple customers at the same time, private proxies are "only shared with up to 2 users", and dedicated proxies are exclusive to one customer.

SparkProxy sells capacity. You choose a plan by concurrent threads, and every thread can exit through any IP in a pool of 1M+ datacenter addresses across 80+ countries, including 50,000+ US IPs. Bandwidth is unlimited on every plan, each plan runs 30 days, and there is a per-plan speed ceiling under the Fair Usage Policy.

That difference matters more than any price. With Webshare, the number of IPs a target sees from you is the number you paid for. With SparkProxy, it is not something you buy at all. You buy parallelism, and address diversity comes with the pool. For the underlying economics of both units, see datacenter proxy pricing models.

Two SparkProxy tiers above Plus, Pro (1500 threads) and Pro+ (2000 threads), appear in the Fair Usage Policy with speed ceilings of 200 and 250 Mbps but no public price, so they are left out of every cost figure on this page.

Webshare's help center article on connecting through its rotating endpoint, p.webshare.io, says the endpoint "allows proxies to rotate randomly within your list for each request." The phrase that matters is within your list. Rotation on Webshare spreads your requests across the proxies you bought. It does not reach into the rest of their network.

So the load any single IP carries is simple division:

requests per IP per hour = requests per hour / proxies in your plan

Take a price-monitoring job making 60,000 requests a day, which is 2,500 an hour.

Most targets never notice 25 requests an hour from one datacenter address. Some do. Search engines, ticketing sites and large retailers often rate-limit well below that, and on shared proxies you also inherit whatever other customers sent through the same IP that hour. When a target starts returning 429s, a list-based plan offers one lever: buy more proxies. At Webshare's published shared rates that lever is cheap for a long time, which is a real point in its favour.

On SparkProxy the rotation universe is the pool, so the same 2,500 requests an hour are spread across far more addresses than any list you would realistically buy. The trade is that you cannot pick which IPs you get, and shared-pool IPs are also used by other customers. If your target cares about reuse, pool depth helps. If it cares about churn, a changing IP hurts, which is the case covered in rotating vs static datacenter proxies.

This is the section to read twice.

Webshare's help center article on the bandwidth limit states three things plainly: the limit "covers your entire plan, not individual proxies," limits "are set monthly and do not roll over," and "exceeding this limit will stop your proxies from functioning, just as when your subscription period ends." That is a hard stop, not a slowdown. A scraper that burns its allowance on day 19 is offline until the cycle resets or the plan is upgraded.

Error-rate dashboards will not warn you about this, because nothing fails until everything fails. If you run Webshare in production, alert on bandwidth consumed as a share of the allowance, and size the tier from measured bytes per request rather than request counts. A 250 GB allowance is about 1.7 million responses at 150 KB, but only around 125,000 fully rendered pages at 2 MB.

SparkProxy has no bandwidth meter, but "unlimited" still has a physical limit: the plan's speed ceiling. The arithmetic is worth doing, because nobody publishes it:

These are upper bounds calculated from the ceiling (Mbps divided by 8, times 86,400 seconds), not throughput SparkProxy promises. The Fair Usage Policy describes the speed as a ceiling, and real transfer depends on the exit IP, the target and the route. The useful reading is the opposite direction: if your job moves a few hundred gigabytes a month, you are nowhere near the ceiling on any plan, and bandwidth is simply not a variable you have to manage. If it moves tens of terabytes, check the ceiling before assuming "unlimited" covers it.

Background on how providers count transferred bytes is in what is bandwidth in proxy services.

Webshare's help center says all paid plans default to a concurrency limit of 500, and the paid High Concurrency feature raises it to 3,000 or more, scaling with the number of proxies in the plan. Exceed it and requests fail with a client_connect_high_concurrency 429 error.

SparkProxy's public plans run from 100 to 1000 threads. For raw parallel connections per dollar, Webshare's default is generous, and a team that needs 500 simultaneous requests but little data will find it cheaper there.

What decides whether you need those threads is latency, not ambition. A thread that waits 1.5 seconds per response completes about 40 requests a minute. So 100 threads at that pace is roughly 4,000 requests a minute, or about 5.8 million a day, as an illustrative ceiling. Many scraping jobs never saturate even the Starter plan, and many that think they need 1,000 threads actually need faster targets or fewer retries. Understanding concurrent connections in proxies walks through sizing it properly.

Webshare wins this category outright. Dedicated proxies are exclusive and static, private proxies are split between at most two customers, and Webshare's help center describes 10 manual replacements per month on paid plans plus an automatic replacement feature for proxies that stop working or report the wrong location. If you manage logged-in accounts, whitelist your egress at a partner, or need the same IP for weeks, that is the product.

SparkProxy offers a sticky port, 11002, which holds the same exit IP across a session window. That covers multi-step flows such as pagination behind a cart or a login followed by a few page views. It is not a dedicated address: the IP is not reserved for you, and you cannot keep it for a month. The distinction is covered in what is a sticky session proxy.

# SparkProxy: new exit IP per request
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000 https://ipinfo.io/ip

# SparkProxy: same exit IP held for the session window
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11002 https://ipinfo.io/ip

# SparkProxy: SOCKS5 with remote DNS
curl -x socks5h://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:13000 https://ipinfo.io/ip

The two vendors take opposite approaches to risk, and it affects how you should evaluate them.

Webshare lets you start at zero with 10 free proxies, and its refund article allows a refund when three conditions all hold: the request comes "not later than 48 hours after the purchase," plan bandwidth usage is under 1 GB for proxy server plans, and fewer than 1,000 proxies were used. In practice that refund covers a mistaken purchase, not an evaluation. Yearly billing is marketed on the pricing page as saving 30%.

SparkProxy offers a 24-hour trial with 250 concurrent threads and unlimited data, no credit card, and its refund policy states that paid plans are strictly non-refundable, including partial periods. Longer terms discount the monthly rate by 5% quarterly, 10% half-yearly and 15% yearly, charged once for the term. On Core, yearly works out to $119 a month, billed as $1,428.

The practical consequence: on SparkProxy, the trial is your only evaluation window, so run your real target at your real concurrency during those 24 hours. On Webshare, the free plan is the evaluation and the paid refund is a narrow safety net. On either vendor, do not buy a year up front until a month of production traffic has proved the fit. Wider context on trial and refund structures across the market is in proxy free trials and refund policies compared.

The cases below are illustrative assumptions, not measurements. Webshare bandwidth and High Concurrency add-on prices vary with plan size in their configurator, so where a workload needs them, the table says so instead of guessing a figure.

Workload A is the honest headline: for small jobs, a $75 thread plan is the wrong purchase, and Webshare's entry pricing is an order of magnitude lower. The comparison only turns when bandwidth becomes the dominant cost, or when per-IP limits push the proxy count so high that managing the list becomes its own problem.

For workloads B and C, open Webshare's configurator with your measured monthly transfer, write down the fully configured price, and compare that single number against the SparkProxy plan whose thread count matches your peak concurrency. Anything else compares a partial price to a complete one.

Webshare is the better buy when

• Your job is small or bursty and the monthly transfer sits comfortably inside the 250 GB base option.
• You need exclusive, static IPs for accounts, allowlists or long sessions.
• You want shared proxies in very large numbers: published tiers reach 60,000.
• You need residential or static residential addresses from the same vendor.
• You want to test with zero spend and no deadline, using the free plan.

SparkProxy is the better buy when

• Monthly transfer is large or impossible to forecast, and a hard bandwidth stop would take production down.
• Your target rate-limits per IP and your list keeps growing to keep up.
• You want one invoice line with no bandwidth, concurrency or IP-authorization add-ons to size, and you run from several egress IPs that all need whitelisting.
• You need datacenter exits in more countries than a 50+ country list covers; check your specific countries on both sites.
• Part of the workload needs rendering or anti-bot handling, which the SparkProxy Scraping API covers at 1 credit per plain fetch, 5 per rendered page, and 10 per screenshot or PDF, with paid plans from $49 for 250,000 credits.

If you are leaving Webshare for a reason other than the ones above, Webshare alternatives maps each reason to a different kind of replacement, and IPRoyal vs Webshare covers the dedicated-IP route.

A comparison page, this one included, cannot tell you how your target treats either network. Run both for a day.

1. Measure bytes per response first. Fetch 50 real pages from your target without a proxy and average the size. Multiply by your monthly request count. This one number decides whether bandwidth matters.
2. Start Webshare's free plan. Send 200 requests to your target through the 10 free proxies and record status codes. Shared free proxies are the worst case of their network, so a clean result here is a strong signal.
3. Start SparkProxy's 24-hour trial the same day. Send the same 200 requests through port 11000, then repeat at the concurrency you plan to run in production. The trial gives you 250 threads, so test at your real peak.
4. Find the per-IP breaking point. On Webshare, push one proxy with sequential requests until 429s or challenges appear. Divide that rate into your hourly volume: the result is the minimum list size you would need.
5. Price the complete configuration. Webshare: proxies plus bandwidth tier plus concurrency. SparkProxy: the plan matching your peak threads. Compare full numbers only.

Record success rate, block rate, median latency and bytes per record for each. Buy the cheaper option that clears your success-rate bar, month to month, and only move to a longer term once a production month confirms it. If you switch later, switching proxy providers without downtime covers running both in parallel.