Smartproxy Alternatives: 7 Options Compared

The company published the change on its own site: Smartproxy became Decodo on 22 April 2025. Login credentials, billing details, subscriptions and renewal terms carried over untouched. Smartproxy endpoints and URLs keep working, and migrating to Decodo-branded endpoints is optional rather than forced.

This matters more than it sounds. A large share of "Smartproxy alternatives" traffic is not shopping, it is confusion. Somebody's monitoring dashboard suddenly says Decodo, or a teammate finds an invoice from a company nobody recognises, and the reflex is to go looking for a replacement. If that is your situation, stop here. Nothing broke.

It also means the search results you are reading are mostly stale. Any article comparing "Smartproxy" pricing that does not mention Decodo was written before April 2025, and its numbers are more than a year old. Decodo's residential and datacenter tiers have both moved since then. Check the date on anything that quotes a price, including this page.

One more housekeeping note from the same page: Decodo warns that smartproxy.org and smartproxy.cn are impersonator sites, and that the legitimate domains are decodo.com and decodo.cn. If you are hunting for a login because the name changed, that is a bad moment to click the wrong result.

Setting aside the rebrand confusion, the reasons split into five buckets, and each one points at a different vendor. Buying by overall reputation instead of by exit reason is how people end up paying more for a worse fit.

The residential bill moves and you cannot forecast it. Per-GB billing is accurate and unstable by design. A target starts serving a rendered page instead of a JSON endpoint, or somebody forgets to block images in a headless browser, and the invoice doubles without anyone shipping a feature. This is the most common exit reason, and as the next few sections show, it is usually solved by changing the billing model rather than the vendor.

Unused gigabytes expire. Decodo's per-GB residential plans are monthly subscriptions. Buy the 50 GB plan at $150 and use 20 GB, and your effective rate is $7.50/GB, more than double the sticker. Seasonal and event-driven workloads get hit hardest by this.

You need something Decodo does not sell in the shape you want. Fixed, allowlistable static IPs at scale. A published datacenter price you can put in a spreadsheet. Unmetered bandwidth. Compliance paperwork for a procurement team.

Price at the very bottom or the very top. Below about 5 GB a month, a free tier beats any paid plan. Above about 1 TB a month, negotiated rates at Bright Data, Oxylabs and SOAX get genuinely cheap in a way self-serve pricing pages never show.

You want a second provider, not a replacement. Redundancy against a bad pool day is a legitimate reason to sign up somewhere else without cancelling anything.

Before comparing, be precise about which Decodo product you are on. It is a multi-product catalog, and "leaving Smartproxy" means something different depending on the line item.

Source: decodo.com/pricing, the Decodo datacenter product page, and the Web Scraping API pricing page, all read on 31 August 2026. Trial terms on residential are 100 MB for 3 days, with a 14-day money-back window on paid plans that excludes free-trial users.

A note on honesty. Decodo's datacenter page lists a pay-per-IP model whose unit figures did not state their billing period unambiguously on the version we read, so we are not printing a derived monthly number for it. Check that one in the dashboard rather than trusting any comparison article, ours included.

Two things fall out of that table immediately. Decodo's datacenter proxies are cheap, between $0.45 and $0.60 per GB. Its residential proxies are the expensive line. If your bill hurts, look at which row is generating it before you shop, because the fix for one is nothing like the fix for the other. If you are not yet certain which proxy type your targets require, our comparison of residential, datacenter and mobile proxy types is the thing to read before any pricing page.

All figures are vendor list prices read on 31 August 2026. Proxy vendors reprice frequently, several of them more than once a year, so treat this as a snapshot and verify before you buy.

Read the third column twice. Every "cheapest rate" in this category is gated behind a volume nobody browsing a comparison article is buying. IPRoyal's widely quoted $1.75/GB needs a 10 TB minimum. SOAX's $0.50/GB sits behind a $3,000 monthly platform fee. Rayobyte's $0.50/GB starts at 5,000 GB. Quoting those numbers as though they were entry prices is the standard failure of every listicle on this keyword.

Twenty-five gigabytes a month of rotating residential is a realistic mid-size workload: a price monitor covering a few thousand SKUs, or a rank tracker on a decent keyword set. Here is what each vendor charges for exactly that, using published list prices and the tier a buyer would actually land on.

One vendor out of six beats the incumbent. That is the finding nobody publishes, and it is why so many people switch away from Decodo residential and end up paying more.

The SOAX row deserves its own arithmetic, because the platform-fee model confuses people. SOAX charges a monthly plan fee plus per-GB usage. Builder is $200/month plus $3.00/GB on Tier 1 locations; Team is $500/month plus $2.20/GB. To beat Decodo's $2.75/GB on the Team plan you need to solve 500 + 2.20g < 2.75g, which gives roughly 909 GB a month. Below that, SOAX costs more than the thing you left, and the gap is not small. SOAX is priced for teams that want seats, rollover credits and postpaid billing, not for one developer with a crawler.

Oxylabs is the other row worth pausing on. There is no listed tier between the 20 GB Basic plan at $100 and the 125 GB Advanced plan at $500. If your usage sits at 25 or 40 GB, you are either overbuying by a factor of five or negotiating. That is a deliberate enterprise packaging decision rather than an oversight, and it tells you exactly who Oxylabs is built for.

These two run the largest and most heavily audited networks in the category, and both are genuinely better than Decodo on one specific axis: procurement.

Bright Data

Residential runs $4.00/GB pay as you go, with monthly plans at $3.50/GB (141 GB, $499), $3.00/GB (332 GB, $999) and $2.50/GB (798 GB, $1,999), per brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network on 31 August 2026. Datacenter is sold per IP rather than per GB: $1.40/IP at 10 IPs, $1.00/IP at 100, $0.95/IP at 500 and $0.90/IP at 1,000. ISP proxies run $1.80/IP at 10 down to $1.30/IP at 1,000.

Buy Bright Data when you need a per-IP datacenter model with fixed addresses, when a compliance team is going to ask questions you need documented answers to, or when your volume is high enough that account-managed pricing beats every self-serve page in this table. Do not buy it to save money at 25 GB. The pay-as-you-go rate is 23% above Decodo's 25 GB tier.

Oxylabs

Residential is $6/GB at 5 GB, $5/GB at 20 GB, $4/GB at 125 GB and $2.50/GB at 1 TB, per oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool on 31 August 2026. The network is advertised at 175M+ IPs across 195+ countries, with targeting by country, city, state, continent, ZIP, coordinates and ASN, and plans include HTTP(S), HTTP3 and SOCKS5 support with unlimited concurrent sessions.

Coordinate-level and ASN targeting is a real capability gap in this list, and the HTTP3 support is unusual. Oxylabs is the pick when your targeting requirements are unusually granular, or when you need a vendor whose trial and onboarding come with a human attached. It is also the most expensive entry point here by a wide margin, and it does not pretend otherwise.

IPRoyal is the most misquoted vendor on this keyword. Its pricing index advertises residential "from $1.75/GB". The residential product page shows the actual ladder: $7.00/GB at 1 GB, $5.95/GB at 2 GB, $5.25/GB at 10 GB, and $1.75/GB only on a custom plan with a 10 TB minimum. Pay-as-you-go rates run slightly higher again, at $7.35, $6.25 and $5.51. Both sets are on iproyal.com/residential-proxies, read on 31 August 2026.

So on rate alone, IPRoyal is roughly 60% more expensive than Decodo at 25 GB. Buy it anyway if this describes you: your traffic is bursty, and your gigabytes need to survive the month. IPRoyal advertises never-expiring traffic. Decodo's per-GB plans are monthly subscriptions, and unused allowance does not carry.

That flips the comparison for anyone whose scraping is seasonal. Run two heavy months and four idle ones on Decodo's 50 GB plan, and you spend $900 a year while forfeiting whatever you did not use. Buying 100 GB once from IPRoyal at the 10 GB tier rate is about $525, and it sits in the account until you spend it. The per-GB rate is worse and the annual bill is lower. Nobody prices expiry, and for burst workloads it dominates everything else on the page.

IPRoyal also sells datacenter proxies from $1.39 per proxy with unlimited bandwidth advertised, ISP from $1.80 per proxy, mobile from $117/month, and a Web Unblocker from $1.00 per 1,000 requests, per its pricing index on the same date.

Webshare is the only vendor in this comparison that undercuts Decodo at a normal volume, and it is also the only one with a free tier you can genuinely build on: 10 datacenter proxies with 250 GB a month at no cost.

Its paid structure, from webshare.io/pricing on 31 August 2026:

• Datacenter, per proxy per month: $0.0299 at 100 proxies ($2.99), $0.0269 at 1,000 ($26.91), $0.0239 at 5,000 ($119.60), $0.0179 at 60,000 ($1,076.40)
• Static residential, per proxy per month: $0.30 at 20 ($6.00), $0.27 at 1,000 ($270), $0.225 at 10,000 ($2,250)
• Rotating residential, per GB: $3.50 at 1 GB, $2.75 at 10 GB, $2.25 at 100 GB, $1.40 at 3,000 GB

The catch, and it is a real one, is pool quality. Per-proxy pricing at three cents a month buys you addresses that many well-defended targets have already seen. That is fine for the workloads datacenter IPs suit and useless for the ones they do not. Test on your actual targets during the free tier before assuming the price advantage survives contact with a bot manager.

For anyone comparing the per-proxy and per-GB models properly, shared vs dedicated datacenter proxies explains what you are actually renting in each case, and what is a dedicated datacenter proxy covers when a fixed address is worth paying for.

SOAX

A platform plan plus usage, priced by geographic tier. Sandbox is free with 2 proxy packages and 1 seat; Builder is $200/month plus VAT; Team $500; Scale $1,500; Enterprise $3,000. Tier 1 locations (US, UK, Japan and similar) run $5.00/GB on Sandbox, $3.00 on Builder, $2.20 on Team, $1.50 on Scale, and $0.85 down to $0.50 on Enterprise at 15+ TB. Tier 2 and Tier 3 locations are cheaper at every level, bottoming out at $0.35 and $0.25.

Two things make SOAX distinctive rather than merely expensive. It charges one rate across residential and mobile, which no other vendor here does, so mobile-heavy work is priced sanely. And credits roll over, 60 days on monthly plans and 365 days on annual, which is a middle position between Decodo's expiring allowance and IPRoyal's permanent one. Below roughly 900 GB a month it is the most expensive option in this article.

Rayobyte

Rayobyte is the US-based option with the widest published ladder, per rayobyte.com/pricing on 31 August 2026. Rotating residential runs $3.50/GB Starter, $2/GB Consumer, $1.50/GB Professional, $0.70/GB Corporate, and as low as $0.50/GB on Enterprise at 5,000 GB and above. Static datacenter starts at $1/IP, rotating datacenter at $0.30/GB down to $0.23/GB, static ISP at $5/IP, and rotating ISP at $3.75/GB down to $2.50/GB.

That rotating datacenter line is the interesting one. At $0.23 to $0.30 per GB it is the cheapest metered datacenter rate in this comparison, below Decodo's $0.45 to $0.60. If your exit reason is the datacenter row of your Decodo invoice specifically, Rayobyte is the direct answer and the migration is small. Its residential trial is self-serve; datacenter and ISP trials go through sales.

Here is our own row, with the disqualifier first, because it applies to most people reading this page.

SparkProxy sells rotating datacenter proxies. That is the whole catalog. No residential, no ISP, no mobile. If you are on Decodo for residential exits, sub-country targeting, carrier IPs, social platform work, or anything that hard-blocks datacenter ASNs, we are not a replacement, and no amount of tuning changes that. Stay on Decodo, or pick one of the residential vendors above.

If your targets do tolerate datacenter IPs, which covers a lot of price monitoring, SERP work, rank tracking, public catalog crawls, ad verification and QA, the reason to look at us is the billing unit. Plans are flat monthly by concurrent thread count: $75 for 100 threads, $140 for 250, $240 for 500, $440 for 1,000. Bandwidth is unlimited on every plan, with no caps and no overage fees. A month where you move 40 GB and a month where you move 900 GB cost the same number.

The pool is 1M+ datacenter IPs across 80+ countries, targeted at country level. The trial is 24 hours with 250 threads and no card required.

Everything runs through one host on three ports:

# Rotating pool, a new exit IP per request (HTTP and HTTPS)
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000 https://www.sparkproxy.io/

# Sticky session, the same exit IP held across requests
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11002 https://www.sparkproxy.io/

# SOCKS5, TCP only, no UDP associate
curl -x socks5h://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:13000 https://www.sparkproxy.io/

Authentication is username and password or IP allowlist, and how proxy authentication works covers the trade between them. Note the SOCKS5 caveat: TCP only. If you were relying on UDP through your incumbent, that does not carry over.

The strongest version of this recommendation is not "switch to us". It is the two-lane split described in the next section.

Comparing dollars per gigabyte across vendors is the wrong comparison, and here is the arithmetic that proves it.

The number that decides your bill is cost per 1,000 useful records, which folds in three things a price page cannot see: how big your responses are, how often they fail, and how many records each successful response yields.

bytes_per_useful_record = median_response_bytes / (success_rate * records_per_response)
cost_per_1000_records   = (bytes_per_useful_record * 1000 / 1073741824) * price_per_GB

Run it on two shapes of the same job, both on Decodo's 25 GB residential tier at $3.25/GB.

Shape A, rendered product pages. Median response 1.4 MB, success rate 0.82, one record per page.

Bytes per useful record: 1,468,006 / 0.82 = 1,790,251. Per thousand records: 1.667 GB. Cost: $5.42 per 1,000 records.

Shape B, the listing endpoint behind those same pages. Median response 90 KB of JSON, success rate 0.97, 48 records per response.

Bytes per useful record: 92,160 / 46.56 = 1,979. Per thousand records: 0.0018 GB. Cost: $0.006 per 1,000 records.

Same vendor. Same rate. A 900x difference in what the data costs. Finding the listing endpoint is worth more than every price negotiation in this article combined, and it takes an afternoon in the network tab.

This is also why the two-lane split usually beats switching. Decodo's datacenter tier at $0.45 to $0.60 per GB is not what is hurting you; the residential line is. Move the fraction of your crawl that datacenter IPs can serve onto a cheap metered datacenter plan or a flat unmetered one, and keep residential for the targets that genuinely need it. You cut the expensive line item without taking migration risk on the hard targets, and you end up with a second provider as redundancy for free. Our walkthrough of datacenter proxy pricing models has the full arithmetic for the metered versus flat decision.

Vendors will not tell you this, because it does not sell a full migration. It is still the right answer for most people who arrive at this page.

If you have decided to move, run this before you cancel anything.

Bake off on your own URLs, not on a test site. Pull 200 real URLs from your existing crawl and run them through both providers back to back. A success rate against ipinfo or httpbin tells you nothing about whether a bot manager likes the exit IP.

import statistics
import requests

URLS = [...]  # 200 real URLs from your own crawl, not a demo site

def bench(proxy, label):
    ok, sizes = 0, []
    for url in URLS:
        try:
            r = requests.get(url, proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=30)
            if r.status_code == 200 and len(r.content) > 2000:
                ok += 1
                sizes.append(len(r.content))
        except requests.RequestException:
            pass
    moved_mb = sum(sizes) / 1_048_576
    median_kb = statistics.median(sizes) / 1024 if sizes else 0
    per_record_kb = moved_mb / max(ok, 1) * 1024
    print(f"{label}: {ok}/{len(URLS)} ok, {moved_mb:.1f} MB moved, "
          f"median {median_kb:.0f} KB, {per_record_kb:.0f} KB per useful record")

bench("http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000", "candidate datacenter")
bench("http://USER:PASS@your-incumbent-endpoint:PORT", "incumbent residential")

The last column is the one that matters. It is the input to the cost formula above, and it is the only way to convert two incompatible price models into one comparable number.

Four more things that break during proxy migrations, in rough order of how often we see them:

• Sticky session semantics differ. Session TTLs, how a session is addressed, and whether a session survives a connection reset are all vendor-specific. Anything that assumes a session lives for exactly N minutes needs retesting.
• Geo-targeting syntax differs. Some vendors encode the country in the username, some use a separate endpoint, some use a header. Your config abstraction probably assumes one of those three.
• Error codes are not portable. A 407 from one gateway and a 502 from another can both mean "you are out of allowance". Retry logic keyed to specific status codes needs remapping, or you will silently retry a billing error a thousand times.
• Protocol support is not universal. SOCKS5 is widely offered. UDP support through it is not. Check before you assume.

Keep the old account alive for one full billing cycle after cutover. The rollback is worth more than the saved month.

An alternatives article that recommends switching to everybody is an advertisement. Stay where you are if any of these are true.

You are on residential at under 100 GB a month and your bill is predictable. At $2.75 to $3.75 per GB, Decodo sits at the cheap end of the residential market, and the 25 GB table above shows exactly one vendor beating it. Switching to save nothing is not free; it costs an engineering week.

You depend on sub-country targeting or the 100+ prebuilt scraping templates that ship with the Web Scraping API. Rebuilding parsers you currently get for free is a real cost that never shows up in a price comparison.

Your workload is data-light. If your responses are small JSON payloads, per-GB billing is close to optimal, and every flat plan in this category will overcharge you.

You have not measured yet. Almost everyone unhappy with a proxy bill has never looked at median response size, success rate, or records per response. Measure those three first. Roughly half the time the fix is in your own code, and the other half you will at least know which vendor above to try.

• Confused by the name change: stay put. Smartproxy is Decodo, and your credentials still work.
• Cheapest rotating residential at normal volume: Webshare, the only vendor here that undercuts Decodo at 25 GB.
• Bursty or seasonal workloads: IPRoyal, for never-expiring traffic despite a worse per-GB rate.
• Cheapest metered datacenter: Rayobyte at $0.23 to $0.30 per GB, below Decodo's $0.45 to $0.60.
• A free tier to prototype on: Webshare, with 10 proxies and 250 GB a month, or the SOAX Sandbox plan.
• Procurement, compliance or account management: Bright Data or Oxylabs.
• Coordinate-level or ASN targeting: Oxylabs.
• Residential and mobile at one blended rate, above roughly 900 GB a month: SOAX.
• Bandwidth-heavy crawling on datacenter-tolerant targets, on a fixed monthly number: SparkProxy, on flat thread-based plans with unlimited bandwidth.
• Everyone else: run the two-lane split before you run a migration.