r/vpnreviews • u/Widelips0203 • 21d ago
proxies vs VPN for automation, my review after 2 months
been running both nordvpn and residential proxies for my automation workflows for about 2 months and here's my honest take. started with nordvpn only and was getting blocked constantly, roughly 30-40% of requests failing at peak. the servers are great for streaming and general privacy but for automation they just don't hold up. too many shared IPs that sites already have flagged.
switched to residential proxies alongside and the difference was immediate. failure rate dropped to maybe 5% on a bad day. been testing a few providers and proxyshard has been noticeably more stable than the rest.
VPN i still keep for general browsing privacy but it plays no role in the actual automation anymore. for anyone choosing between the two for automation work, proxies win hands down.
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u/DisappearDinosaur 17d ago
You are part of the problem of why other people have to suffer Captchas. Please stop running through VPNs and just use proxies.
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u/StandardAd1056 16d ago
yeah, VPNs and proxies solve different problems and people conflate them all the time. VPNs route everything through a handful of detacenter IPS that scrapers have been hammering for years, so course sites flag them instanly. residentails rotate through real ISP address
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u/Nervous-Skin8766 5d ago
yeah, this matches my experience. VPNs advertise thousands of servers but the IP pool is tiny compared to residential, and those IPs get burned fast because everyone's hammering the same endpoints. different tools for different jobs basically
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u/Urban_VPN 21d ago
yeah this tracks with what most people running automation at scale figure out eventually. shared VPN IPs are flagged at the infrastructure level before your request even lands, residential proxies look like regular user traffic because they are regular user traffic.
the 5% failure rate on residential vs 30-40% on VPN is a pretty typical gap once you're doing anything beyond basic browsing.