Web Proxy vs. VPN: What’s the Difference?

Despite their similarities, web proxies and Virtual Private Networks (VPN) services differ in ways that can significantly impact your online safety. It’s not always easy to understand which tools you can trust, and which services will actually meet your needs.

In this guide, we are strictly comparing personal VPN services and web proxies, as they’re both used to unblock web content and are often confused as a result.

Here’s a table summarizing the main differences between a web proxy and personal VPN software:

Criteria	Web Proxy	VPN Service
Main Use	Unblock Websites	Protect Online Privacy & Security, Unblock Websites, Access Geo-Blocked Streaming Services & Torrenting
Speed	Slower	Faster
Encryption	None or AES/ChaCha20	AES-256/ChaCha20
Coverage	Browser Window	All Web Traffic
Price	Usually Free	Usually Paid
Customer Support	Rare	Live Chat or Email Support
Ease of use	No Installation	Requires Software

A web proxy is a type of website that routes your browser traffic through an intermediary server.

When you use a web proxy, you’re using a website to request another website. You type a URL into the input field shown on the web proxy. The web proxy site then fetches the URL, and processes it, changing file and image requests in the page to run the proxy. It then returns the now-processed page to your browser.

This causes the destination website to see all requests originating from the proxy’s IP address and not your own.

Web proxies operate on the application layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model.

They only work within the browser window that uses the web proxy URL (e.g. https://nl.hideproxy.me/go.php?u=example). They do not affect traffic from other browser windows, or from other applications running on your device.

Web proxies don’t necessarily encrypt your requests, either. Some advanced proxies offer SSL encryption, but it may not be as robust as VPN encryption.

In contrast, a VPN service is a type of software that creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server of your choice.

When you download a VPN application and connect to a server, it encapsulates and reroutes all of the network traffic leaving your device, including traffic from different applications and clients.

This process hides your real IP address, but it also makes your web traffic unreadable to unauthorized users. This protects your requests from interception on unsecured WiFi networks, or surveillance by third parties like your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

VPN services typically use much more sophisticated encryption to secure data transmission between your device and the VPN server. They’re more reliable for unblocking geo-restricted content, and they may also offer additional features like a kill switch or transparent zero-logs policy.

Summary: The Key Differences Between Web Proxies & VPNs

Web proxies and VPN services will both temporarily hide your IP address and unblock geo-restricted web pages. However, that’s about all they have in common. There are significant differences in encryption strength, device compatibility, privacy protections, and more:

• VPN services robustly encrypt your entire device’s web traffic. This is often achieved with virtually unbreakable standards like OpenVPN with AES-256 or WireGuard with ChaCha20. Some web proxies offer AES-256 or ChaCha20 HTTPS encryption, others offer no encryption at all.
• Web proxies are usually slower than VPNs. Both tools will have a negative impact on your connection speeds. Contrary to popular belief, web proxies will often have a larger impact because they require additional processing and filtering to rewrite the target webpage. VPN encryption comes with a processing overhead, but they do not alter elements on the webpage, making them the faster option for loading web pages.
• VPNs are compatible with different devices and operating systems, whereas web proxies cover a single browser window. VPNs work at a network level, meaning they encrypt your entire device’s network traffic. You can use a VPN on multiple devices simultaneously, while web proxies only work within a single browser window.
• VPNs allow you to customize your connection. You can usually choose from dozens of server locations, switch between protocols or ciphers, enable a kill switch, set up multi-hop servers, and much more. A web proxy might let you disable cookies, enable HTTPS encryption, or remove certain ads — but that’s about it.
• High-quality VPNs require a subscription, whereas web proxies are mostly free to use. While there are free and paid versions of both tools, paid options are usually much more secure, offer more technical features, and aren’t incentivized to collect logs of your online activity.

Browsing the Internet: Web Proxy vs VPN

Now we’ve laid out the technical differences, you might be wondering what using a web proxy and VPN actually looks like. Since they use different methods to hide your real IP address, the internet can look different when using each tool.

Here’s a video showing you what it’s like to use a web proxy or VPN to browse the internet:

We’ve now covered the key differences between web proxies and VPN services, and how exactly the two tools work. In this section, we’ll explain which tool is better in specific areas.

Here’s an overview of how they compare in different testing categories:

Category	Winner	Explanation
Security & Encryption	VPN	Top-tier VPNs use ChaCha20 or AES-256 encryption. They may also conduct security audits to find and eliminate vulnerabilities. Web proxies either offer no encryption or HTTPS encryption. Some web proxies show ads with injected malware.
Speed	VPN	Both tools will negatively affect your speeds, but web proxies are usually slower than VPNs because they spend time processing, filtering, and altering responses on congested servers.
Privacy	VPN	Premium VPNs have no-logs privacy policies, third-party audits, and transparency reports. Web proxies often do not have privacy policies at all.
Coverage	VPN	VPNs encrypt and reroute your entire device’s traffic, whereas a web proxy typically works in a single browser window.
Price	Proxy	Most web proxies are free to use, while good VPNs often require a paid subscription.
Streaming	VPN	VPNs have a large pool of IP addresses which are often recycled for unblocking geo-restricted streaming services. Most proxies don’t encrypt your traffic, so streaming services can easily detect and block proxy connections.
Torrenting	VPN	VPNs offer sophisticated encryption and additional settings for fast torrenting. Most web proxies simply aren’t designed for safe or private torrenting.
Bypassing Censorship	VPN	VPN encryption makes them far more effective at bypassing firewalls in countries with online censorship. Some VPNs offer additional obfuscation features, or they may combine SOCKS5 proxies with VPN servers.
Customer Support	VPN	VPNs offer live chat, email support, and online resources. Web proxies typically offer no customer support at all.
Ease of Use	Proxy	Web proxies don’t require any software installation. You can simply enter a URL on a free proxy website and access the requested page. VPN software requires you to install it and sign in before using it.

Security & Encryption

A VPN encrypts your entire device’s network traffic to protect you from ISP tracking and spying on unsecured networks.

Encryption is a way of scrambling data so that only authorized users can understand the information. A cipher (e.g. AES-256) is an algorithm used to perform the encryption. This converts the original data, called plaintext, into ciphertext that is undecipherable to onlookers.

If you’re using a high-quality VPN, you’ll be able to choose your connection protocol and encryption cipher. We recommend using WireGuard with ChaCha20 encryption or OpenVPN with AES-256 encryption, both of which are virtually unbreakable.

Most web proxies do not encrypt your traffic. If they do use encryption, it’s typically the same protocol used to secure HTTPS websites. If implemented correctly, with a correctly chosen cipher, it can be as strong as a VPN.

You should never use a web proxy that isn’t available over HTTPS, or else your ISP and anyone else performing a Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) can monitor which webpages you access via the web proxy service.

The target website might be available via HTTPS, but the data coming back from the web proxy to you would be in plaintext, meaning it wouldn’t be encrypted.

Most web proxies are not incentivized to value your online privacy or security. Web proxies directly edit the elements of a page, which means they can remove certain objects and intrusive advertisements from a webpage.

But in reality, they can just as easily change or add in their own intrusive advertising, introduce malware, and even steal sensitive data from form submissions by the user, which can be exploited and sold to others.

Speed

Web proxies are generally slower than VPNs because they use congested servers to process, filter, and rewrite your requested web page.

A web proxy fetches your requested data from the target website server, processes it (which could include changing image URLs, filtering out ads, removing scripts or objects, or more), and then builds the webpage with a proxy header, before finally sending it back to you.

This long sequence of events adds to the processing time and causes a delay in the webpage loading.

VPNs encrypt your traffic, which will reduce your speeds, but they send data straight from the target website server to your browser, without any additional processing.

To verify this, we tested the download speeds of three different web proxies (KProxy, CroxyProxy, and Proxyium) and three VPNs (ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Proton VPN Free) on a 350Mbps connection. Below is a breakdown of our results:

Service	Download Speed (350Mbps Baseline)	Speed Loss (%)	Server Location
ExpressVPN	327Mbps	6.57%	US
NordVPN	302Mbps	13.7%	US
Proton VPN Free	167Mbps	52.2%	US
KProxy	338Mbps	3.4%	Canada
CroxyProxy	5Mbps	98.5%	US
Proxyium	3Mbps	99.1%	Poland

Alternatively, here’s a chart showing the differences in web proxy and VPN speeds:

We found that high-quality VPNs reduced our internet speeds by less than 10% when connected to a VPN server in the same country. This is partly due to a larger variety of server locations, which helps to evenly spread users and improve speeds overall. A lot of proxies only offer a few locations, which leads to congestion.

CroxyProxy and Proxyium were shockingly slow in our tests. Our internet speeds dropped by more than 90% using these web proxies and couldn’t even reach 10Mbps on a 350Mbps connection.

KProxy was the fastest web proxy we tested, even surpassing the premium VPNs. However, KProxy isn’t safe enough for us to recommend. It logs your real IP address and we experienced occasional server outages during testing.

Privacy & Trustworthiness

To remain competitive, premium VPNs usually implement strong privacy measures including strict no-logs policies, independent audits, and detailed transparency reports. It’s almost always clear who runs the VPN service and where it’s headquartered.

Most web proxies do not share this incentive for transparency. It’s not uncommon for free web proxies to harvest personal details or login credentials in order to monetize their service, and some have even been known to inject malicious code into user traffic.

It’s telling that the majority of web proxies either admit to extensive data logging in their privacy policy, or don’t have privacy policies at all. In most cases, it’s not clear who’s actually behind a free web proxy and what their motivations are.

It’s also much more common for free web proxies to reveal your real IP address to the websites you visit.

A web proxy relays traffic from your browser to the target website, but it also modifies the page content in order to rewrite links and files the website needs to load (such as JavaScript, CSS, and images).

In some cases, this process can fail, which can leak your real IP address to the target website.

Some web proxy servers also add the X-Forwarded-For header to the onward request to the web server, which includes your true IP address. A VPN server will never include this header, and so the website will only ever see the VPN Servers’ IP address.

There are a handful of good free proxy websites. However, in most cases, if the service is free, you’re either being fed intrusive ads, or your browsing activity and login credentials are being stored and sold to third parties.

In fairness, the same warnings apply to many free VPN services. There are a few trustworthy free VPNs, but even some of the most popular applications are simply web proxies in disguise.

If you’re concerned about online privacy, you’re much more likely to find a premium VPN that doesn’t force ads on you, and is fully transparent about its data logging, server infrastructure, and corporate practices.

Traffic Coverage

VPN services typically come packaged in applications that are installed on your device. When you open the application and connect to a VPN server, the software reroutes and encrypts all the internet traffic leaving your device.

This means that all network traffic leaving your device, whether it’s from your browser, email client, or the game you’re playing, is protected in an encrypted tunnel. Your ISP cannot view your online activity because the entire device is covered.

Web proxies are set up in just one browser window. When you use a web proxy, only the traffic from that window tab will go through the proxy server.

If you send data from another application on your device (like a torrenting client) or even just another tab in your browser, your true IP address will be visible to anyone spying on your activity. This makes using a free web proxy much more risky than a VPN.

Price

Web proxies are completely free. In contrast, we analyzed the cheapest available price of our 20 highest-rated VPNs and found the average monthly cost of a VPN is now $4.11 on yearly or multi-year subscription.

If you’re new to VPN services and want more flexibility, you can opt for a monthly contract, which averages around $11.77 per month.

Importantly, paying for a VPN service means the service doesn’t have to inject intrusive ads to maintain its expensive server networks.

While safe free VPN services do exist, they often come with monthly data caps, slower speeds, and they can’t unblock as many streaming services. We also found that 25% of free VPNs suffered from data leaks, including IP and DNS leaks.

Web proxies are usually free, but they offer a rudimentary product with fewer features and weaker security as a result.

Instead of collecting an upfront subscription fee for the service, they exploit their users and make money in malicious ways.

Streaming

Streaming services restrict their content to certain countries due to licensing agreements. By changing your IP address, you can change your virtual location, circumvent these restrictions, and unblock content from other regions.

Although both tools can change your IP address, VPNs are far better at unblocking streaming services because it takes more than just an IP address to fool a streaming platform.

Streaming services are constantly working to ban IP addresses that originate from proxies or VPN servers. This makes the vast majority of free proxy IP addresses useless in unblocking streaming services.

VPNs change more than just your IP address, which makes them far more effective. They can change your DNS server, and also mask your HTML5 geolocation and GPS location when used with a browser toolbar extension.

Premium VPNs have the resources to invest in cycling IP addresses and circumventing streaming restrictions, whereas free web proxies are not incentivized to provide this level of functionality.

In our testing with Hide.me’s web proxy, we couldn’t even enter our login details into Netflix. We could log into Netflix with Proxyium, but the video we wanted to watch was stuck buffering.

Put simply, web proxies can’t be used to access streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, or Max. They simply lack the functionality and geo-spoofing abilities of a VPN, making it much easier for streaming services to detect and block them.

Torrenting

Web proxies simply aren’t built for torrenting anonymously because they work via a single web browser window. They are used for browsing web pages, and cannot be used for downloading or uploading files in a separate application such as a torrent client.

VPNs are much better suited to torrenting privately. They encrypt your entire device’s network traffic, meaning your ISP cannot see that you’re torrenting or the files you’re downloading via your torrent client.

VPNs also have additional features that make torrenting safer and more convenient. These include kill switches, port forwarding, and split tunneling.

The best torrenting VPNs implement no-logs privacy policies, transparency reports, and diskless servers, to avoid keeping logs on their customers.

Bypassing Censorship

Web proxies are not safe or secure enough to be relied upon for circumventing censorship. They leave you vulnerable to data leaks, and they’re often blocked in countries with comprehensive online firewalls.

VPNs are a much more reliable option for bypassing censorship. The best options come with advanced stealth protocols and obfuscated servers, which are specifically designed to bypass online censorship.

Paid VPNs also have more resources to continually improve their obfuscation technology. In contrast, free web proxies simply don’t prioritize people needing to bypass online censorship because they don’t have the resources to fund the development of this technology.

Customer Support

VPN services are run by companies with a financial incentive to provide the best service possible. In other words, they want individual customers to continue paying for a subscription and stay with the service.

VPN services offer three main types of customer support: live chat support, email support, and other online resources (like tutorial videos or guides). You can often find these on the VPN provider’s official website, sometimes in a customer support hub page.

Some VPNs offer chatbot support, which can be frustrating to interact with, however you can opt for an email address instead.

Web proxies — especially free ones — are typically much smaller operations with no real support network.

The web proxies that do offer customer support are selling or promoting a different product, such as website scraping or automation services.

These paid web proxies are targeting business owners looking for a proxy server service, instead of individual users looking for personal online protection.

Ease of Use

Using a web proxy is incredibly easy. You simply open a browser, navigate to the proxy’s website, and enter the URL of the website you’d like to visit.

However, pages rendered through web proxies sometimes appear mangled or lack their original functionality. For example, some web proxies can’t load YouTube or Netflix video content. They might also fail to load detailed images.

This occasionally makes using a proxy frustrating compared to using a VPN.

A VPN requires software installation onto your device, but the applications are typically very easy to use once installed. If you’re just browsing the web, simply login, choose your preferred server from a list of countries, and click on a button to connect.

Now we’re taking a step back from web proxies and focusing on other types of proxy, which can serve a broad range of personal and commercial purposes.

Proxy servers can support traffic distribution, cache data to speed up common requests, and can act as firewalls and web filters to check data packets against predetermined security policies.

Each type of proxy is optimized for its specific use case, offering different levels of privacy, security, and functionality beyond the scope of web proxies.

SOCKS proxies, for example, can handle any type of internet traffic, not just web browser traffic. Transparent proxies, often used by organizations, intercept all network traffic without requiring any configuration from the user’s end, often for content filtering or monitoring purposes.

Here are different commonly used proxies and their attributes:

Forward Proxy

If you’ve heard someone use the term ‘proxy’ in conversation, they were probably talking about a forward proxy. It’s a proxy that acts as an intermediary between a device (such as a computer or smartphone) and the internet.

Forward proxies handle outbound traffic from your device and to the internet.

For instance, when you access a webpage through a forward proxy, your device sends the request to a forward proxy server. Then, the forward proxy retrieves the requested web page and sends it back to your device.

In short, forward proxies act as middlemen for your internet traffic. This term encompasses many proxy types. Residential proxies, data center proxies, and public proxies are all examples of forward proxies, they are simply configured differently to fulfill specific functions.

Reverse Proxy

Reverse proxies are a type of proxy server you’re unlikely to set up yourself, but you might unknowingly encounter in daily life.

Similar to a forward proxy, they act as an intermediary between a device and the internet. However, reverse proxies handle inbound traffic destined for multiple backend servers.

Reverse proxies are primarily used by organizations to mitigate security risks, improve website load times, and maintain a large server network.

Specifically, they are used for caching of web content for users on the local network, as well as SSL termination.

Reverse proxies are also used for load balancing: the process of distributing traffic across multiple servers. This can prevent server failures from taking down a public website by removing a failed server from the pool of servers that can respond to a query.

Much like any proxy, if configured incorrectly, they can pose a security risk to organizations. Research carried out by McAfee Labs found that reverse proxies configured in cloud native applications in AWS can easily be prone to vulnerabilities.

Similar to forward proxies, there are several types of reverse proxies, including load balancers, SSL offloading proxies, and HTTPS reverse proxies.

Public Proxy

Public proxies are freely available to everyone. However, due to their widespread availability, they might suffer from performance issues due to server congestion.

In addition, they may pose security risks, such as data theft or malware injection. Research reported by Wired found that 79% of public proxy servers inserted code into the requested web pages or blocked HTTPS connections.

In addition, you’re sharing an IP address with an unlimited number of strangers, any of whom could be using the service to conduct illegal activity.

Using a free and open proxy, there’s also a risk that the owner of the proxy could misuse your data, for example, selling it to advertisers or even worse.

Any open proxy that you’re typing credentials into might extract those credentials and store or sell that data.

For this reason, it’s advised to avoid logging into any personal account while using a public proxy.

Shared Proxy

A shared proxy is a private proxy that’s shared by a specific group of users. These proxies are provided by companies for internal use or for a number of paying subscribers.

Shared proxies typically offer better speeds and reliability compared to public proxies because there are fewer users, and they can invest funds into server infrastructure.

However, similar to public proxies, if you share your proxy server with multiple users, they can be exploited by cybercriminals.

Nonetheless, shared proxies are usually safer than public proxies, especially if they are provided to a closed group of users, such as a company’s internal network.

Residential Proxy

Residential proxies use real IP addresses assigned to real people by their internet service provider.

It makes your internet traffic look like it is coming directly from a normal household. They are typically attached to actual physical locations, such as a city or a whole country.

Residential proxies are primarily used by companies to scrape websites for data, where other proxies have been detected and blocked. Companies frequently use them for:

• Gathering social media analytics
• Market price monitoring
• Testing geo-fenced platforms
• Penetration testing
• Ad verification

These proxies are also sometimes used by individuals to mask their real IP address when browsing the web.

However, renting a residential proxy IP address can be expensive. It’s actually more affordable to subscribe to a VPN, which offers the same functionality for a cheaper price.

Transparent Proxies

A transparent proxy tells the destination website that it is a proxy server and forwards your real IP address. It’s useless for protecting your privacy or unblocking restricted content.

Individuals likely won’t find many uses for a transparent proxy, but you might be forced to use one. Transparent proxies are not identified to you; your traffic is forced through the proxy without you ever having consented to its use.

They’re regularly used in libraries, businesses, and schools to filter content or monitor web access.

They can also be used on public Wi-Fi to stop users accessing content that would take up too much bandwidth.

Fortunately, you can use a VPN to bypass content restrictions enforced by a transparent proxy.

SSL Proxy

An SSL proxy uses the SSL protocol to encrypt data passing from your device to a target website or service you wish to access.

SSL is a widely adopted protocol designed to encrypt communication between web applications and servers. TLS is the successor of SSL and their names are often used interchangeably because this evolution happened before publication.

SSL proxies are designed to handle encrypted HTTPS traffic, which is far safer than HTTP, but may not be as safe as VPN encryption, depending on the configuration.

Anyone with access to your network can see the domains you are accessing via an SSL proxy, but not the specific URLs you visit.

There are two types of SSL/HTTPS proxies:

1. Forward SSL proxies are mainly used for decrypting and inspecting outbound traffic.
2. Reverse SSL proxies are a buffer for inbound traffic traveling to a server.

These proxies are generally used by organizations that need enhanced online protection.

Data Center Proxy

Based solely in data centers, data center proxies are typically hosted by cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or the Google Cloud Platform. They’re typically used by businesses to scrape websites for data used in market research.

The IP addresses in a data center tend to be very similar. This is because IP addresses are often assigned in blocks, which will include a range of IP addresses that look alike.

As an example, a data center might have an entire /24 block, which means they will have IP addresses 1.2.3.(0-255). A /24 IP block, or ‘slash-24’, is a term used to define a range of IP addresses. Written out individually, a group of data center IPs look like this:

• 1.2.3.1
• 1.2.3.2
• 1.2.3.3
• 1.2.3.4
• 1.2.3.5
• 1.2.3.6

However, data centers are more likely to have even larger blocks of /16 IP addresses — 1.2.(0-255).(0.255).

For this reason, it can be easy for content providers to identify them and block them to enforce geographic content restrictions.

Proxies hosted in data centers are more typically used as forward proxies because they can be used in high volumes to simulate human behavior and send requests.

They can be used to monitor online obstacles (IP blocks or CAPTCHAS), track the price of goods or services online, or test an application’s functionality.

They’re also typically used with bots to automate the purchase of high-demand items like sneakers or concert tickets.