HTTP vs SOCKS5: proxy protocol differences and which to use

An HTTP proxy speaks the language of the web. Your software asks it for a page and the proxy fetches it on your behalf. For HTTPS sites — nearly all of them — the software uses the CONNECT method: it asks the proxy to open a tunnel to the site, then sends the encrypted connection through it. From then on the proxy only forwards bytes it can't read.

It's the most compatible type: browsers, operating systems, scripting libraries and almost every program with a "proxy" setting support it.

SOCKS5 works at a lower level: it doesn't know what a web page is, it forwards TCP connections to any address and port. That makes it suitable for non-web traffic too, such as mail clients, apps or custom protocols. The protocol also covers UDP traffic, but support depends on the provider and the software.

One important detail is DNS. With SOCKS5 the site's name can be resolved by the proxy rather than your computer, so DNS lookups also leave through the mobile network and not your own connection. In cURL and Python you get this with the socks5h:// scheme (the “h” stands for hostname).

With an HTTPS site, page content, passwords and cookies are encrypted from your software all the way to the site, with both HTTP and SOCKS5. The proxy only sees which site you connect to and how much traffic passes.

With a plain-HTTP site (increasingly rare) an HTTP proxy could read and modify the content. That's true of any network you pass through, not just proxies: always prefer HTTPS.

• Antidetect browsers (AdsPower, Multilogin, GoLogin, Dolphin{anty}): SOCKS5, so DNS goes through the proxy too. Both work as long as the type matches the one set on the proxy.
• Regular browser: HTTP is the simplest to configure; Firefox also handles SOCKS5 with remote DNS well (see the Firefox guide).
• Scripts (cURL, Python, Node.js): either; with SOCKS5 use socks5h://.
• Apps and non-web traffic: SOCKS5.

# HTTP
curl -x http://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org

# SOCKS5 with DNS via the proxy
curl -x socks5h://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org

import requests  # for SOCKS5: pip install "requests[socks]"

proxy = "socks5h://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT"
r = requests.get("https://api.ipify.org", proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=30)
print(r.text)

More complete examples are in the cURL, Python and Node.js guides.