What's the difference of proxy and vpn ?

[Deleted member 1264815]

Hey, what's up I'm wondering what's the difference between both?

With VPN it allows you to change between different proxies but many users also use them and with proxy you buy it and only you use it?

Am I right?

 

[mindmaster]

There are both free and paid service for both of them.
Free ones usually gets abused, spammed and are slow.

Simply put, yes. With VPNs you get access to a pool of different IPs.
While a proxy represent 1 IP. Proxies can be public, shared or private.
Public proxies... are public.
Shared proxies are paid and used by a limited number of users.
Private proxies are paid and used by 1 user.

Here is a definition for VPN https://whatismyipaddress.com/vpn
And here is one for proxy https://www.whatismyip.com/what-is-a-proxy/

 

[Chris.Roark]

Here's a short article on what are both proxies and VPN: https://www.bestproxyproviders.com/blog/what-are-private-proxies-and-vpns-knowledge-base/

With VPN it allows you to change between different proxies but many users also use them and with proxy you buy it and only you use it?

A VPN provider will allow you to change between their servers, and indeed all these servers are shared, but your connection to the VPN server is encrypted, so nobody can snoop on your traffic.

And if you buy a dedicated private proxy, you'll be the only user of that IP. But the connection to a proxy server is not encrypted, so your ISP/government can log your traffic.

Which one is better? It depends on what you are trying to achieve.

So OP, what do you need VPN or proxy for?

 

[turelink]

Let me in short,

VPN for torrenting and streaming (bypass geographical restriction).
such as https://phreesite.com/best-vpn-for-netflix/
When you in the UK want to access US Netflix, all your traffic goes via a connected VPN server.

Proxies for automated tool & BOT to handle more accounts,
such as https://www.privateproxyreviews.com/best-instagram-proxies/
You can easily use the proxies to handle the more account on a PC, mainly use HTTP for more threads.

 

[spinservers]

Turelink explained it as best as I can. Can't explain it better myself.

The way I look at it, VPN is more for consumers and the masses whereas proxy is for specific purposes.