Both use IP addresses registered to an ISP — which is why they are so often confused. The distinction lies in whose hands the IP sits in. A residential proxy temporarily borrows the connection of a real home user. An ISP proxy, on the other hand, is an IP that the provider keeps in a hosting facility but that is registered to an ISP. The result: the ISP proxy combines a residential appearance with datacenter speed.
With an ISP proxy there is no intermediate "home connection" step; that is why latency is close to datacenter level.
Key Differences
In one sentence: if you want diversity, residential; if you want stability, ISP.
Which One for Which Job?
The decision mostly comes down to one question: "do I need to appear with the same identity, or a different one each time?"
If you answer "yes" to two of the three questions, your decision is clear. If the two are close to each other, measure with a small pilot.
The ISP Advantage in Account Management
Social media and marketplace accounts audit session continuity. A platform that sees a different IP at every login starts a "has this account been compromised?" check and asks for verification. With an ISP proxy the IP stays fixed for weeks, so that loop never starts. For the detailed method, see social media proxy page for more details.
Speed Expectations
The values are representative for targets inside Turkey. You can run your own measurement with the ping test tool .
Cost Breakdown
If you manage 10 accounts, with an ISP proxy you rent 10 IPs and pay a fixed fee regardless of traffic volume. Doing the same job with residential requires sticky sessions and deducting each account's session traffic from your GB budget. For low-traffic but long-running work, ISP is the economical choice; for work that produces large numbers of short requests, residential is.
A common mistake: running a high-volume scraping job over a handful of IPs just to take advantage of the ISP proxy's "unlimited traffic". Heavy request volume from a small number of IPs runs into rate limits, and your IPs burn out fast.
If you would also like to weigh the third option, the residential–datacenter comparison is worth reading. For the rotation decision, there is our rotating–static article; for address verification, the Proxy Check tool is ready.