Proxies vs VPNs: What's the Difference?

A VPN and a proxy are both intermediaries. Your traffic travels to their server first, the server forwards it, and the destination sees the intermediary's IP address instead of yours. That shared mechanic is why the two get confused — and why comparison articles tend to declare a winner when there isn't one.

The real difference is the shape of the connection. A VPN is one device-wide tunnel with one exit point, built for a person who wants privacy. A proxy is per-connection routing with as many exits as the network has addresses — a residential network like the platform's network spans 16M+ IPs across 195+ countries — built for software that needs its requests to originate from many different networks and locations.

A VPN client installs a virtual network interface on your device. From that moment, every packet from every application is encrypted, sent to the VPN server, decrypted there, and forwarded to its destination. The destination sees the VPN server's IP.

• Device-wide capture — browsers, background apps, system updates, everything goes through the tunnel without per-app configuration.
• One exit IP — usually a datacenter address shared with other subscribers. It changes only when you disconnect and pick another server.
• Consumer privacy focus — the design goal is hiding your browsing from the local network and your ISP, not giving software fine-grained control over where traffic exits.

That design is deliberate. A VPN protects the person using the device. It was never meant to give a script its own pool of addresses.

A proxy is configured per application, per tool, or per request. Nothing changes at the system level: the app opens a connection to the proxy endpoint, the proxy forwards it, and the destination sees the proxy's exit IP. Any traffic you don't explicitly point at the proxy takes its normal route.

With the platform that endpoint is <proxy-host>:80, speaking HTTP, HTTPS (CONNECT), and SOCKS5 — the protocol you pick depends on your client. Connections rotate by default, meaning each request exits from a different residential IP. When a workflow needs the same IP across several requests, sticky sessions pin one via parameters in the username.

# rotating: new IP per request
http://user123:pass@<proxy-host>:80

# sticky: one US IP pinned for 10 minutes
http://user123-cc-US-s-job42-ttl-600:pass@<proxy-host>:80

That last line is the core distinction in one string: country, session, and lifetime chosen per request, by the client, with no reconnect. A VPN has no equivalent.

• Scope — a VPN captures the whole device; a proxy touches only the traffic you route through it. You can send one scraper through a proxy while the rest of your machine stays on its normal connection.
• IP variety — a VPN gives you one exit at a time. A rotating proxy pool gives you a fresh IP per request, or multiple sticky sessions, each pinned via its own session id.
• Per-request control — proxies let you select country, city, or ASN and set session lifetime inside the credentials themselves. Switching a VPN location is a manual reconnect that drops every open connection.
• Tooling integration — HTTP clients, scraping frameworks, and browsers all accept proxy settings natively, per job. VPNs are all-or-nothing unless you fight with split tunneling.
• Pricing model — VPNs sell flat monthly subscriptions. Residential proxies are typically metered by traffic; the platform charges the published rate per GB from a prepaid balance, and neither balance nor GB ever expire. Volume discounts are previewed live on the Plans page.

"VPNs are encrypted, proxies are not" is the most repeated claim in this comparison, and it needs unpacking. HTTPS is end-to-end encrypted between your client and the website regardless of what sits in the middle. Neither a VPN operator nor a proxy operator can read the contents of your TLS traffic.

What a VPN adds is encryption of *everything* between your device and the exit server — including plaintext protocols like old-style HTTP, DNS in some setups, and anything else that isn't TLS. A proxy adds no encryption of its own: plain HTTP through a proxy is still plain HTTP on both legs. If your traffic is sensitive, the fix is the same in both cases — use TLS.

On the account side, the platform does not log the contents of proxy traffic, and dashboard sessions are end-to-end encrypted with X25519 key exchange and ChaCha20-Poly1305 on top of TLS — details in the account security guide.

Choose based on the job, not the marketing.

• VPN — personal browsing privacy on networks you don't trust, hiding activity from a local network operator or ISP, and situations where one exit location is enough.
• Proxies — geo-testing your site or ads from many countries, collecting public data at scale, ad verification, price and SEO monitoring, and any multi-region operation where each session needs its own IP.

The two stack without conflict. If a VPN is active and an application is configured to use a proxy, the app's traffic travels through the VPN tunnel to the proxy endpoint, then out through a residential IP: app → VPN → proxy → destination. Your local network sees only the VPN; the destination sees only the proxy exit.

The cost is latency — two hops instead of one — so most people run the VPN for general device privacy and route only specific tools through the proxy. There is no need to disconnect one to use the other.

If your workload sounds like the proxy column — many IPs, precise geo control, per-request routing — registration requires no email, no password, and no KYC; you get a generated access token. Store that token safely; it is the only credential and cannot be recovered.