Bright Data vs Decodo: Which Proxy Network Fits Your Budget

Decodo is the former Smartproxy, rebranded in 2025. If you are comparing either one against Oxylabs, our Decodo vs Oxylabs and Oxylabs vs Bright Data pages cover those pairings.

The ladders tell you who each company is built for.

Decodo prices for self-serve buyers. Residential starts at 3 GB for $11.25 and climbs through 10, 25, 50 and 100 GB plans, then enterprise tiers from $2.50/GB at 250 GB down to $2/GB at 1 TB. Every step is small, so a growing project moves up one rung at a time. Plans auto-renew monthly and are priced plus VAT.

Bright Data prices for accounts that will grow into a sales relationship. Pay as you go is available on every network with no monthly commitment. The first residential subscription, though, is a $499 monthly plan. Between "a few GB on a card" and "$499 a month" there is no rung, so small and mid-sized teams either stay on pay as you go or overbuy.

Neither is wrong. They reward different shapes of spend. If your usage is small and uneven, a fine-grained ladder protects you. If you already know you will spend thousands a month, Bright Data's structure and account management matter more than where the first rung sits.

Published residential rates, as of September 2026:

• Decodo: $3.75/GB (3 GB, $11.25), $3.50/GB (10 GB, $35), $3.25/GB (25 GB, $81.25), $3.00/GB (50 GB, $150), $2.75/GB (100 GB, $275). Enterprise from $2.50/GB at 250 GB to $2/GB at 1 TB. Pay as you go $4/GB. Advertised pool 115M+ IPs in 195+ locations.
• Bright Data: pay as you go $4/GB with the RESIGB50 code, shown struck through from $8/GB. Monthly plans at $499 (141 GB included), $999 (332 GB) and $1,999 (798 GB), shown with the same 50% promotion. Advertised pool 400M+ rotating residential IPs in 195 countries, with country, state, city and ZIP targeting included.

Now the same four budgets through both ladders. Where a budget falls between Decodo rungs, we combine a plan with pay as you go at $4/GB. This is arithmetic on list prices, not a test of either network.

Two readings matter more than the totals.

At small budgets, the gap during Bright Data's promotion is modest. Decodo's advantage comes from not having to jump rungs, not from a dramatically lower rate.

At $2,000 a month, Decodo's list buys about 25% more traffic. That is real money, but at this level you are the customer both sales teams want, and a quote from each will move those numbers more than the price card does. Use the list gap as a bargaining chip, not as the final answer.

Pool size is the other axis. Bright Data advertises roughly 3.5x more residential IPs. For most country-level scraping that difference does not show up in results. For thin geographies, say a mid-sized city in a smaller market, a bigger pool can mean more usable exits. Test the specific cities you need on both trials rather than trusting either headline.

When we read Bright Data's residential page, the RESIGB50 code was advertised as 50% off residential proxies for 3 months, with the undiscounted rates shown struck through: $8/GB pay as you go and $7, $6 and $5/GB on the monthly plans.

Budget for month four, not month one. If your forecast was built on $4/GB and the code lapses, the same traffic costs twice as much. On a 37.5 GB monthly workload, that is the difference between $150 and $300.

Three ways to handle it:

1. Model both rates before signing. Put the undiscounted figure in the budget and treat the promo months as savings.
2. Ask in writing what happens after the promotion. Plan terms, not a chat reply.
3. Use the promo window to measure. Three discounted months is a good period to learn your real GB per useful record, which is the number that decides everything else. Our guide to residential proxy pricing per GB explains how to calculate it.

Decodo also labels some plans with savings percentages, notably on mobile. Apply the same check there: what does the plan cost when the label disappears?

Here the gap narrows, and Bright Data's catalogue is the deeper one.

What that means for a budget:

Small datacenter bandwidth jobs favour Decodo. 100 GB costs $54 on Decodo's per-GB ladder, against about $60 on Bright Data pay as you go. Close. At 1 TB the two meet: $450 on Decodo against $499 on Bright Data's 1 TB plan.

Very high datacenter bandwidth favours Bright Data, simply because it publishes tiers Decodo does not. 5 TB at $0.42/GB is on the price card. Above 1 TB on Decodo, you are asking for a quote.

Dedicated ISP at scale is a draw on list. Both bottom out at $2.50/IP, Decodo at 200 IPs and Bright Data at 1,000. Decodo reaches its floor sooner, which suits mid-sized account operations.

Bright Data's published 100 GB per IP fair usage allowance deserves a note. On a 10-IP shared plan that is 1 TB a month of headroom, generous for most uses, but it is a stated limit. Our explainer on datacenter proxy pricing models covers how per-IP and per-GB billing behave when a workload changes.

Decodo publishes a full mobile ladder: 2 GB at $3.75/GB ($7.50), 8 GB at $3.50, 25 GB at $3.25, 50 GB at $3.00 ($150) and 100 GB at $2.75 ($275), with pay as you go at $4/GB. Those rates were displayed with a 50% savings label, so check what they revert to. It advertises 10M+ mobile IPs from 700+ carriers across 160+ locations.

Bright Data advertises 7M+ mobile IPs and offers pay as you go on its mobile network. It requires a KYC compliance review before you can use residential or mobile IPs. Check its mobile pricing page for the current per-GB rate; we did not quote it here.

For budget purposes, Decodo's small mobile plans are the cheaper way to find out whether a target needs mobile IPs at all. Many teams buy mobile because a residential test failed once, not because they measured. Compare datacenter vs mobile proxies before paying mobile rates for a job that may not need them.

This is where the two companies differ most, and where a budget can go badly wrong.

Bright Data Web Unlocker bills per successful request. $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go, or a $499 Scale plan including 383K requests with extra requests at $1.30 per 1,000. The page says you pay only for success, and a free tier of 5K requests per month needs no card.

Decodo Site Unblocker offers per-GB billing at $10/GB for 1 GB, $9 at 5 GB, $8.50 at 10 GB, $8 at 25 GB, $7.50 at 50 GB and $6.75 at 100 GB, plus VAT. A pay-per-request option also exists; its rates were not on the part of the page we read.

The billing unit matters more than either rate. Per-request billing ignores page weight. Per-GB billing tracks it exactly. So the question is how heavy your target's responses are.

Set $1.50 per 1,000 requests against $8.50 per GB and the break-even response size is about 176 KB. Lighter than that, per GB is cheaper. Heavier, per request wins. Here is 100,000 successful requests at different page weights, using the rate for the volume tier each lands in:

Illustrative assumptions: every request succeeds, and page sizes are examples, not measurements of any site. Rendered pages from unblockers are often heavy because the response includes the output of JavaScript execution, which pushes most real workloads toward per-request billing. If you are scraping lightweight JSON or small HTML pages, per GB can be meaningfully cheaper.

Measure your average response size on a trial before choosing. It is one line in most HTTP clients and it decides this comparison outright. If you are weighing managed unblocking against running proxies yourself, read web scraping API vs self-managed proxies.

A monthly budget has to absorb more than the headline rate.

VAT

Decodo's plans show prices plus VAT. For EU buyers who cannot reclaim it, that adds a fifth or so to the bill. Check how the vendor handles your tax status before comparing totals.

KYC time

Bright Data states a representative will run a short compliance process before you use residential or mobile IPs. Budget calendar time as well as money, and see why proxy providers require KYC for what they typically ask.

Refund conditions

Decodo offers a 14-day money-back guarantee on first purchases where under 20% of the plan was used on regular plans, under 10% on enterprise, and not for trial users. That is a safety net for a wrong-sized plan only if you notice quickly.

Trial size

Decodo's residential trial is 100 MB over 3 days: enough to check connectivity and geo, not enough to measure a block rate. Bright Data offers free trials and matches first deposits dollar for dollar up to $500, which effectively doubles an initial test budget.

Failed requests on per-GB plans

On residential and datacenter per-GB plans, a blocked request still transfers bytes. A 25% failure rate is a 25% price increase on any per-GB product, whichever vendor sells it. Our guide on reducing proxy bandwidth costs covers blocking images, compressing responses and retry discipline.

Pick Decodo when:

• Your monthly residential spend is under about $500, or grows unevenly month to month.
• You want to start small on residential, mobile or ISP and move up one rung at a time.
• Your unblocker targets return light responses, where per-GB billing wins.
• You need dedicated ISP IPs in the tens to low hundreds.

Pick Bright Data when:

• Your targets are heavily protected and you want unblocking billed only on success.
• You push multiple terabytes of datacenter traffic a month and want published tiers for it.
• Procurement wants a large, established vendor with compliance paperwork.
• You need the biggest advertised residential pool for thin geographies, and your trial confirms it matters.

Negotiate with both when your spend passes about $2,000 a month. Our Bright Data alternatives page lists more options to quote against.

Both vendors bill residential and most unblocking by usage. That is the right model when the target demands residential IPs, and an expensive one when it does not.

Many targets, including a lot of public catalogue, pricing and search pages, accept datacenter traffic at sensible request rates. For those, a flat plan removes the per-GB exposure completely. SparkProxy sells datacenter proxies by concurrent threads with unlimited bandwidth: Starter $75/mo for 100 threads, Core $140 for 250, Boost $240 for 500 and Plus $440 for 1000, on a pool of 1M+ datacenter IPs across 80+ countries. It does not sell residential or mobile proxies, so if your target blocks datacenter ranges, one of the two vendors above is the right purchase.

Check the category first with a single request through a rotating exit:

curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000 -s -o /dev/null \
  -w "status=%{http_code} bytes=%{size_download}\n" https://target.example/page

The bytes value doubles as your page-weight measurement for the unblocker math above. Our SparkProxy vs Bright Data and SparkProxy vs Decodo pages cover the flat-plan comparison with each vendor in detail.