List of Top Free Open Source & Self Hosted Application for Proxy

Proxy applications are software programs that act as intermediaries between a client and a server. They can be used for a variety of purposes, including:

Security: Proxy applications can help to protect clients from malicious websites and other online threats by filtering traffic and blocking access to known dangerous sites.
Performance: Proxy applications can improve performance by caching frequently accessed content and compressing traffic.
Privacy: Proxy applications can help to protect users’ privacy by hiding their IP addresses and encrypting traffic.
Control: Proxy applications can be used to control access to the internet by blocking certain websites or categories of websites.

In addition to these general features, proxy applications can also offer a variety of other features, such as:

Authentication: Proxy applications can be used to authenticate users before they are allowed to access the internet or certain websites.
Load balancing: Proxy applications can be used to distribute traffic across multiple servers, which can improve performance and reliability.
Logging: Proxy applications can log all traffic that passes through them, which can be useful for security and troubleshooting purposes.

Table of Contents

List of proxy is a server application

A proxy is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource.

imgproxy – Fast and secure standalone server for resizing and converting remote images. It works great when you need to resize multiple images on the fly without preparing a ton of cached resized images or re-doing it every time the design changes. MIT Go/Docker
Residential proxies by rayobyte: Rayobyte is a residential proxy provider that offers a variety of plans and features to meet the needs of different users. Their residential proxies are sourced from real ISPs and are rotated frequently to avoid being blocked.
We can find how to setup a proxy server as below; Rayobyte also offers a number of features that make it easy to use their proxies, including:
- Geo-targeting: You can choose to use proxies from a specific country, city, or even region.
- Unlimited threads: You can send as many concurrent requests as you need, and each request will receive a unique IP address.
- CAPTCHA avoidance: Rayobyte’s proxies are designed to avoid CAPTCHAs, so you can focus on your data scraping or other tasks.
- Ethical sourcing: Rayobyte’s proxies are ethically sourced from real users who have consented to have their IP addresses used.
inlets – Expose your local endpoints to the Internet – with a Kubernetes integration, Docker image and CLI available. MIT Go/Docker
iodine – IPv4 over DNS tunnel solution, enabling you to start up a socks5 proxy listener. ISC C
Nginx Proxy Manager – Nginx Proxy Manager is an easy way to accomplish reverse proxying hosts with SSL termination. MIT Nodejs/Docker
Outline Server – A proxy server that runs a Shadowsocks instance for each access key and a REST API to manage the access keys. Apache-2.0 Docker/Nodejs
PHP-Proxy – Web proxy script built specifically to be fast, easy to modify and to support video sites such as YouTube. MIT PHP
Pomerium – An identity-aware reverse proxy, successor to now obsolete oauth_proxy. It inserts an OAuth step before proxying your request to the backend, so that you can safely expose your self-hosted websites to public Internet. Apache-2.0 Go
Privoxy – Non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. GPL-2.0 C
sish – Open source serveo/ngrok alternative providing HTTP(S)/WS(S)/TCP tunnels to localhost using only SSH. MIT Go
socks5-proxy-server – SOCKS5 proxy server with built-in authentication and Telegram-bot for user management and user statistics on data spent (handy when you pay per GB of data). It is dockerised and simple to install. Apache-2.0 Nodejs
Squid – Caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. GPL-2.0 C
SWAG (Secure Web Application Gateway) – Nginx webserver and reverse proxy with PHP support, built-in Certbot (Let’s Encrypt) client and fail2ban integration. GPL-3.0 Docker
Tinyproxy – Light-weight HTTP/HTTPS proxy daemon. GPL-2.0 C

Proxy applications serve as intermediaries between clients and servers, offering several key features. They enhance privacy by masking users’ IP addresses, enable content filtering and access control for security, and can balance traffic load across multiple servers. Additionally, they often provide caching capabilities for faster content retrieval, enforce security measures, and enable access to geo-restricted content. Proxies play a crucial role in network management, offering flexibility, customization options, and the ability to monitor and log network activity, making them valuable tools for various online activities.

Type of proxy server

There are two main types of proxy servers: forward proxies and reverse proxies.

Forward proxies are used by clients to access the internet. They sit between the client and the internet and intercept all of the client’s requests. The forward proxy then forwards the requests on to the internet on behalf of the client. This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as:

To improve performance by caching static content.
To filter traffic and block access to certain websites.
To hide the client’s IP address and improve privacy.

Reverse proxies are used by servers to receive requests from the internet. They sit in front of one or more servers and intercept all of the requests that come in. The reverse proxy then forwards the requests to the appropriate server. This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as:

To improve performance by load balancing requests across multiple servers.
To protect the servers from direct access from the internet.
To terminate SSL connections and offload the processing of SSL traffic to the reverse proxy.

In addition to forward and reverse proxies, there are also a number of other types of proxy servers, such as:

Transparent proxies: Transparent proxies are proxies that are not visible to the client or the server. They are typically used by organizations to monitor and filter traffic.
Anonymous proxies: Anonymous proxies hide the client’s IP address from the server. They are often used to improve privacy or to bypass geo-restrictions.
High anonymity proxies: High anonymity proxies go even further to hide the client’s IP address and make it more difficult to track their activity. They are often used by journalists, activists, and other people who need to protect their privacy.
Distorting proxies: Distorting proxies modify the client’s requests to make it more difficult for servers to track their activity. They are often used to bypass CAPTCHAs and other security measures.