Free Proxy Servers in 2026: Which Ones Are Safe to Use

Why This Page No Longer Has a Proxy List

Until this update, this page listed 15 free proxy servers. We took the list down, for two reasons.

Lists go stale fast. Researchers from Inria, CNRS and the universities of Lille and Rennes tested more than 640,000 proxies from 11 free proxy providers every day from April 2021 to October 2023 (the study). Only 34.5% worked even once, and on an average day about 3.4% did. A list printed on a web page, ours included, is mostly dead addresses by the time you read it.

The second reason is worse. Nobody vouches for the proxies that do work. Many are misconfigured servers or devices that were never meant to be public, and on the machines behind them the same study counted 4,452 distinct known vulnerabilities, 1,755 of which let an outsider run code remotely. Whoever controls a free proxy today may not be the person who owns it.

Two earlier studies measured what that means for the people using them:

• Researchers at Georgetown University sent 13 million requests through more than 107,000 listed open proxies in 2018. Over 92% were offline. Of the web pages that came back, 2.2% had been tampered with maliciously, mostly with injected ads, and 413 proxies swapped downloaded programs for malware. About 1% of the proxies that carried HTTPS tried to intercept it with a fake certificate (paper).
• A study presented at the NDSS security conference the same year found that 5.15% of 19,473 working proxies changed pages in malicious or unwanted ways. Of those, 47% injected ads, 39% added tracking or fingerprinting code and 12% sent users to malware (paper).

A few percent sounds small. It stops sounding small when you try one proxy after another until something connects.

The Best Free Proxies Are Already in Your Browser

Three big browsers now come with a free, built-in way to hide your IP address. They call it a VPN, but it covers only the browser, which is exactly what a proxy does. Your other apps keep using your normal connection.

• Opera: free, no account, no data cap and no ads, according to Opera. You choose between three locations: the US (Ashburn), Europe (Amsterdam) and Asia (Singapore). Opera says Deloitte audited its no-log policy. Before you route your browsing through it, you may want to know that Opera is about 68% owned by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech, according to its 2025 annual report.
• Firefox: Mozilla added a free built-in VPN in Firefox 149 (March 2026), with 50 GB of browsing a month. It is rolling out country by country. Since May, users in the US, UK, France, Germany and Canada can pick the location. Mozilla says it doesn’t sell your browsing data or inject ads, but it doesn’t say who runs the servers.
• Microsoft Edge: Secure Network gives you 5 GB a month if you sign in with a personal Microsoft account. Websites see “a similar regional location”, so it hides your IP address but won’t make you appear in another country.

For hiding your IP address from the sites you visit, each of these is a better bet than an anonymous server from a list. A known company stands behind it, with a privacy policy and a reputation to lose. None of them covers apps outside the browser.

Free Web Proxies: Fine for Reading, Not for Logging In

A web proxy is a website that opens other websites for you. You type an address into its box, and the page loads inside the proxy’s site. There is nothing to install or configure.

The price is trust. The web proxy loads the page itself and passes it on, so it can read everything on that page, including whatever you type. HTTPS doesn’t change that, because your encrypted connection ends at the proxy, not at the site. Use a web proxy for reading. Never use one to sign in, pay or send anything personal.

Hide.me’s free web proxy is the one we’d try first. It’s run by a Malaysia-based VPN company, with servers in the Netherlands, Germany and Finland, and options to encrypt the page address and strip scripts. Hide.me says these servers don’t log your IP address or activity. In TechRadar’s test (February 2026) it worked on most websites but not for streaming.

Plenty of other web proxies exist, and most say little about who runs them. VPNBook, which shows up on many lists, is an example: Comparitech (September 2026) found no named company behind it, a five-sentence privacy policy and a week of IP address logs. Before you use any web proxy, look for the operator’s name, a privacy policy and an https:// address. If one of them is missing, close the tab.

On a school or work network, web proxies are usually against the rules and often blocked anyway. Ask the IT team instead (more in our guide to blocked websites).

A Free VPN Is the Better Free Proxy for Most People

If you want your whole device covered, every app and not only the browser, a free VPN does more than any free proxy. It encrypts everything between you and the VPN server, so your Wi-Fi provider or internet provider sees only that you’re connected to a VPN.

The one we’d point most people to is Proton VPN Free. It has no data limit and no ads, and Proton, a Swiss company, says it doesn’t log your online activity. The limits are real but fair. You get one device and servers in 10 countries (the US, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Poland, Romania, Japan and Singapore), and you can’t choose among them. Proton connects you to the fastest free server, and changing it gives you a random one, with a wait of 45 seconds the first time and 10 minutes after that.

Be pickier with other free VPN apps, especially from developers you’ve never heard of. Some pay for themselves in ways you won’t like. The risks chapter below has two big examples, and our article on the dark side of free VPNs has more.

Free Proxies for Developers and Web Scraping

For code, such as checking how a site looks from another IP address or a small scraping job, skip the public lists. Their addresses die within days, and a tampered response can quietly spoil your data. Proxy companies give away small free tiers instead:

• Webshare: 10 free proxies with 1 GB of traffic a month, no credit card (pricing page).
• Oxylabs: 5 free US datacenter IPs with 5 GB of traffic, valid for a month after activation. Registration is required, a credit card isn’t (offer page).

These are datacenter addresses, which websites recognise as proxies more easily than home connections. Read the provider’s acceptable use policy and the target site’s terms before you scrape.

If someone offers you free or very cheap “residential” proxies, ask where the home IP addresses come from. Google’s action against IPIDEA in January 2026 (see the risks chapter) showed one answer: other people’s phones and computers.

In a Country That Blocks Websites

Where a government blocks websites, plain proxies are among the first things it blocks too, and an unencrypted proxy shows your traffic to anyone watching the network. Two free tools are made for this situation.

• Tor Browser is free and open source and sends your traffic through three volunteer-run relays. If Tor itself is blocked, it connects through bridges, entry points that aren’t publicly listed. You can request bridges in Tor Browser’s settings, at bridges.torproject.org, from the Telegram bot @GetBridgesBot, or by emailing [email protected] from a Gmail or Riseup address. In the Georgetown study, the researchers’ Tor exit relay test found no tampering at all.
• Psiphon is a circumvention app for Android, iOS and Windows. Its apps and core technology are open source, and Cure53 and other firms have reviewed key parts. The free version shows ads.

Laws on these tools differ from country to country, and some governments punish their use. Check what applies where you live. We can’t judge that risk for you.

The Risks of Free Proxies, and How to Lower Them

The proxy sees where you go

A proxy relays your traffic, so it sees which websites you visit. On sites with HTTPS (the padlock), it can’t read the pages or your passwords unless you accept a fake certificate. If your browser shows a certificate warning while you’re on a proxy, stop there. On plain HTTP sites, the proxy can read and change everything.

Most free proxies don’t encrypt anything

HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies don’t encrypt the connection between you and the proxy. Your internet provider, or anyone on the same Wi-Fi, can still see your traffic. The proxy only hides your IP address from the website.

A free app can turn you into the proxy

Some free VPN and proxy apps pay for themselves by selling your connection to strangers. The 911 S5 botnet, dismantled by the US Justice Department in May 2024, spread through free VPN apps called MaskVPN, DewVPN, PaladinVPN, ProxyGate, ShieldVPN and ShineVPN. It enrolled millions of Windows computers, and criminals rented their 19 million IP addresses for fraud that took billions of dollars from US pandemic relief programmes (BleepingComputer).

In January 2026, Google disrupted IPIDEA, a network that hid proxy code in at least 600 Android apps and more than 3,000 Windows programs and also handed out free VPN apps that did the same (BleepingComputer). Google counted more than 550 threat groups using its exit nodes in a single week. If your device is one of those exit nodes, other people’s traffic leaves through your internet connection, under your IP address.

How to lower the risk

• Prefer a proxy run by a company you can name, with a privacy policy you can read.
• Stick to HTTPS sites, and never click past a certificate warning.
• Don’t log in, pay or download programs through a free proxy.
• Install VPN and proxy apps only from developers you know, and remove the ones you no longer use.
• On Android, keep Google Play Protect on. Since January 2026 it blocks apps carrying IPIDEA’s proxy code.

How to Set Up a Proxy

You need the proxy’s address (a hostname or IP), its port and its type (HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5). Paid and developer proxies also give you a username and password.

• Windows 10 and 11: Settings > Network & internet > Proxy. Under Manual proxy setup, select Set up next to Use a proxy server, turn it on, enter the address and port, and save (Microsoft’s guide). Chrome and Edge follow this setting. For a SOCKS5 proxy, use Firefox’s own settings instead.
• Mac: System Settings > Network, click your connection (Wi-Fi, for example), then Details > Proxies. Turn on Web proxy (HTTP), Secure web proxy (HTTPS) or SOCKS proxy and enter the server and port (Apple’s guide).
• Firefox: Settings > General > Network Settings > Settings (Configure proxy in newer versions), then Manual proxy configuration (Mozilla’s guide). For SOCKS5, fill in SOCKS Host, choose SOCKS v5 and tick Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5, so your DNS lookups go through the proxy too. The setting changes Firefox only, which makes it the easiest place to try a proxy without touching the rest of your computer.
• iPhone and iPad: Settings > Wi-Fi, tap the info button next to your network, then Configure Proxy > Manual. It applies to that Wi-Fi network only.
• Android: open your Wi-Fi network’s settings, find Advanced options (the wording differs between phones) and set Proxy to Manual. Again, for that network only.

Then check that it worked. Open ipleak.net and look at the IP address and country it shows. The page also lists WebRTC and DNS results. If your real IP address turns up there, the proxy isn’t hiding it completely.

Proxy or VPN: Which Do You Need?

A proxy changes the IP address that one browser or app shows to websites. A VPN does that for the whole device and encrypts the traffic on the way. For a different IP address in the browser for a few minutes, a browser’s built-in option is enough. For public Wi-Fi, for apps outside the browser, or to keep your internet provider out of your browsing, use a VPN. Our proxy vs VPN guide goes into the details.

Streaming is a case of its own. Netflix, BBC iPlayer and most other services block the proxy and VPN addresses they know. Netflix shows “You seem to be using a VPN or proxy” (error E106). Free proxies rarely get past that, and even Hide.me’s web proxy couldn’t stream in TechRadar’s test.

If You'd Rather Pay: ExpressVPN

Go to ExpressVPN

When a free proxy or a free VPN isn’t enough, because you need a particular country, every app covered or protection on several devices, ExpressVPN is the paid option we recommend. It has servers in 113 countries and all 50 US states.

In our price check on October 31, 2026, the cheapest plan was $4.99 a month for 12 months plus 3 free months ($74.85 for the first 15 months), renewing at $99.95 a year. Some visitors were offered a two-year plan at $2.99 a month instead. There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it without much risk.