# Top 5 Decodo (Smartproxy) Alternatives for Proxies and Web Scraping in 2026 > Source: https://scrape.do/blog/decodo-alternatives/ Published: 2026-10-05 · Updated: 2026-10-05 · Authors: Selman Gökçe · Categories: Scraping Tools Decodo sells the same web page two ways. By the gigabyte, through its proxies: $3.50/GB on the 10 GB residential plan. By the request, through its Web Scraping API: $0.50 per 1,000 on the price card. Most people searching for a Decodo alternative are unhappy with one of the two, and the fixes don't overlap. A proxy buyer who burned 10 GB in a week needs a different exit than an API buyer whose "$0.50" requests bill at $1.00. **So this list has two lanes.** The API lane is measured: 1,620 requests through seven scraping APIs on the same 18 URLs on October 5, 2026, with Decodo as the baseline row. The proxy lane is priced: same-day plan captures, Proxyway's network tests and our page weights, which turn a price per GB into a price per 1,000 pages. Full disclosure: this is Scrape.do's blog, the lab is ours, and Scrape.do is one of the five, on the same test as everyone else. *Scraping APIs, same 18 domains, our lab, October 5, 2026:* | Provider | Pages delivered | Speed vs Decodo | Cost per page vs Decodo | Entry plan | Verdict | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Decodo Web Scraping API (baseline) | about 4 in 5 | baseline | baseline | $19 | baseline | | Scrape.do | nearly all | about 4x faster | about a quarter cheaper | $29 = 250,000 credits | picked: the price card vs the bill, speed, billed blocks, per-GB metering | | Bright Data | more than 9 in 10 | about the same | about a fifth more | Pay as you go | picked: one flat price, rate caps | | ZenRows | about 4 in 5 | a little faster | about 4x more | $16 | not picked: same success, 4x the cost | | Zyte | about 4 in 5 | a little faster | varies by site | Pay as you go | not picked: no better than Decodo on success | | Scrapfly | about 4 in 5 | about 1.5x faster | about 3x more | $30 | not picked: no better than Decodo on success | | ScraperAPI | about 3 in 4 | about 1.5x faster | about 9x more | $49 | not picked: fewer pages, 9x the cost | *Residential proxies, Proxyway's tests (updated October 1, 2026), prices captured October 5, 2026:* | Provider | Success vs Decodo | Speed vs Decodo | Price per GB | Traffic terms | Pain relieved | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Decodo (baseline) | top of Proxyway's list | baseline | $3.50 (10 GB plan) | monthly, unused GB lost | baseline | | IPRoyal | a few points lower | about 2x slower | $5.25 (10 GB plan), about 1.5x Decodo | never expires | paying for traffic you never use | | SOAX | about the same | a little slower | $5.00 US on pay-per-GB, $3.00 on the $200 plan | 60-day rollover | country-tiered prices, mobile at the residential rate | | Oxylabs | about the same | about the same | $6.00 (5 GB plan), about 1.6x Decodo's entry | monthly plans | the premium pool | How we measured: each API ran at the configuration that qualified on each domain in our [May 2026 benchmark](https://scrape.do/blog/best-web-scraping-api/), 20 trials per domain for Decodo and Scrape.do and 10 for the rest, and success means the page's content was there, not only a 200 status. Two May URLs had died by October and are left out. Decodo's May run used different URLs on most domains, so part of its drop since May is the test changing, and its cost here is at the default premium pool; set `proxy_pool` per domain and it gets cheaper, as the 100,000-page month further down shows. For US traffic at 10 GB, Decodo is cheaper per GB than all three proxy picks. Smartproxy became Decodo on April 22, 2025. Same company, same network, new name, so every "Smartproxy alternative" below applies too. ## What Decodo Does Well Start with what you'd lose, because for some readers the right answer is to stay. ### The Residential Network Is Top-Tier at a Mid-Market Price Proxyway's residential ranking (updated October 1, 2026) puts Decodo first: level with Oxylabs on success and a little faster. Proxyway's April 2026 test counted nearly 3 million unique IPs in three weeks. The entry price is $11.25 for 3 GB. Oxylabs starts at $30 for 5 GB. Targeting goes down to city, ZIP, ASN and geohash, and sticky sessions last up to 1,440 minutes. If your proxies work and your bill is fine, none of the five picks beats that on performance per dollar. ### Support That Answers "Customer Support" is the most-mentioned pro on G2, and the newest 5-star Trustpilot reviews mostly thank a named agent for a fix: a wrong plan refunded within minutes, three IPs replaced, a billing cycle corrected. Live chat runs 24/7. ### The API Clears Hard Targets Others Miss In our October run, Decodo's Web Scraping API got every Best Buy page, where Scrape.do got about half and Zyte, ScraperAPI and ZenRows none. It also got every page on Amazon, Walmart, LinkedIn, Instagram, Booking, Zillow and X, and every Amazon bestseller page, which had failed for it in our June stress test. Failed scrapes that end in Decodo's internal 613 code are not billed. ### AI Tooling Ahead of Most Proxy Vendors A hosted MCP server, Markdown output, official Python, TypeScript and Go SDKs, a CLI, and n8n, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations, most of them shipped in July and August 2026. For an agent pipeline that already lives on Decodo, that's a lot to rebuild. ### Clean Sourcing, Which Matters More After NetNut Decodo is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, an EWDCI member, and runs KYC for risky target categories. On July 2, 2026 the FBI and IRS [seized NetNut's domains](https://proxyway.com/news/fbi-google-disrupt-netnut) over alleged links between its residential network and the Popa botnet (NetNut's parent disputes them), and netnut.io still shows the seizure notice. The KYC that annoys some Decodo customers is part of that difference. ## Downsides of Decodo Ranked by how often independent sources raise them, then by how much they cost when they hit. Most public complaints are about proxies, not the API (2 of the 40 newest 1-star Trustpilot reviews mention the API), so each one says who it hits. ### Refunds, Renewals and Traffic That Expires Hits: proxy buyers mostly, API buyers through expiring credits. Almost half of the 40 newest 1-star Trustpilot reviews (May 20 to September 22, 2026) are about money: refunds refused or held in the wallet, renewals people couldn't cancel, a $1 card pre-authorisation for a trial that one reviewer didn't expect. The [refund policy](https://decodo.com/faq/billing/can-i-get-a-refund) explains most of them. A refund needs a first purchase of that product (renewals never qualify), a request within 14 days, no free trial taken, no crypto, and usage at or under 20% of the plan or 1 GB, whichever comes first. Taking the free Web Scraping API plan voids refund eligibility for later API purchases. Then there's expiry. Unused subscription traffic is gone at renewal, and so are unused API credits: one reviewer used $3 of a $19 plan and lost the rest. ### "ISP" IPs That Read as Datacenter, and ISP Outages Hits: ISP, static and dedicated proxy buyers. Not the residential pool, and not the API. Half of the recent 1-star reviews are about IP quality, a quarter of them about ISP or static IPs specifically: "all 3 appeared to be datacenter IPs", sky-high fraud scores, German IPs geolocating to the US. "Proxy Issues" is one of the most-mentioned cons on G2. The [status page](https://status.decodo.com/history/1) adds the outages: half of the incidents between August 26 and October 4, 2026 hit ISP proxies. A partial outage of UK ISP proxies ran for nearly ten days (August 26 to September 5), and another for almost two days from October 3. ### The API Price Card Is Not the Bill Hits: Web Scraping API buyers. The card says $0.50 per 1K. That's the standard pool without JavaScript, on the Free and $19 plans. The [`proxy_pool` parameter defaults to premium](https://help.decodo.com/docs/web-scraping-api-parameters), so a request that doesn't set it bills $1.00 per 1K on the same plan. Every Target Template uses the premium pool. JavaScript rendering adds 50%. The pricing page's own playground sample sends `"proxy_pool": "premium", "headless": "html"`, the $1.50 cell. The default exists for a reason. On October 5 we sent the same Walmart, TripAdvisor and Zillow URLs three ways: the bare call and `proxy_pool=premium` cleared almost all of them, and `proxy_pool=standard` almost none. The cheap pool is cheap because it fails on harder sites. Two more details sit in the docs. A non-empty 401, 403 or 429, the codes blocks come back as, [counts as a billed success](https://help.decodo.com/docs/web-scraping-api-response-codes), as do 400 and 404; only 500, 524 and 613 are free. And there is no documented top-up between plans, so the $49 and $99 steps decide your invoice more than your usage does. ### KYC Gates and Restricted Targets Hits: residential and ISP buyers. Banking, crypto, government, ticketing, gaming, telecom, app stores and streaming are blocked by default on the proxies. Mailing, business and streaming targets unlock only after ID or business verification, and only on paid rotating residential plans. The 250 GB residential plan restricts Google. One in five recent 1-star reviews is about this: accounts asked for KYC after payment, or blocked after it. It's a policy trade-off rather than a bug. Bright Data and Oxylabs run KYC too, so switching vendors doesn't make it go away. ### Slow Renders and Silent Failures on the API Hits: Web Scraping API buyers. Decodo's API was the slowest of the seven on average in our October run, about 4x slower than the fastest. The rendered pages were the slow ones: Zillow, G2, X, Trustpilot and Booking took 25 to 50 seconds a page. Four domains failed at the configuration that qualified in our May run, which used different URLs for most of them. Capterra failed every time, Bing three times in four and eBay more than two times in three, almost all with Decodo's 613 "unable to scrape" code after more than half a minute each. Those aren't billed. On Indeed, Decodo returned the site's "401 Authenticating" challenge page almost every time, and a non-empty 401 is billed: you pay for twenty requests to get one usable page. Turning on JavaScript rendering rescued most of the Bing and Capterra pages at the higher rate, and didn't rescue Indeed. Every Decodo response came back as HTTP 200, and one in five was a failure wrapped in that 200. A client that trusts the status code counts them as pages, so read the inner `status_code`. ### You Pay for Every Byte, Including the 403s Hits: proxy buyers. Decodo meters [upload and download, headers and the TLS handshake](https://help.decodo.com/docs/proxy-traffic), and every non-200 answer from the target counts: a 403 block page is billed traffic. Pay as you go comes in whole gigabytes at $4 each. "Pricing Issues" and "Expensive" are among G2's most-mentioned cons, and one 2-star reviewer burned a 10 GB plan "after like 1 week". Every per-GB vendor meters this way, the three proxy picks below included. What differs is how many pages a gigabyte buys, and that depends on the page. ## Proxies or a Scraping API? What One Page Costs We measured it. For each benchmark URL we recorded the HTML document, gzipped as it would travel to a client that accepts compression, and the full weight a real browser downloads with every script, image and font: ![Bar chart of one page's weight: the HTML is about 0.1 MB, a full browser load about 30x more, a heavy Amazon page over 13 MB](/uploads/blog/decodo-alternatives-cost-per-page.png) | What you pay for | Typical page | Per 1,000 pages at Decodo's $3.50/GB | |---|---|---| | The HTML only | about 0.1 MB | under $0.50 | | Everything a browser loads | about 3.5 MB, roughly 30x the HTML | about $12 | | A heavy page (an Amazon product page in a browser) | more than 13 MB | nearly $50 | | One scraping API request, whatever it weighs | priced per page | about $1 on Decodo's default pool; from about $0.12 on Scrape.do | *Typical page = the median of the 11 sites that loaded in a plain headless browser. Eight of the other nine blocked or challenged it; one was a dead URL.* Raw HTML through a residential proxy is cheap: well under Decodo's API price per page on almost every site we measured. That's the case for staying on proxies if your pages render server-side and your scraper already handles blocks. A real browser through the same proxy costs 10 to 80 times more, depending on the site, because you pay for every script, image and font. A scraping API charges per page, whatever the page weighs. The bytes are also the easy part. Eight of our 20 sites blocked or challenged a clean browser from our network, and a residential IP alone doesn't clear a DataDome or Cloudflare challenge. Every retry is more traffic on the meter. ### The Same 100,000 Pages, Five Ways to Pay Take a month of 100,000 pages spread evenly over our 20 benchmark domains (5,000 each), at each route's cheapest configuration, assuming every page succeeds: ![Bar chart of monthly invoices for 100,000 pages: Decodo's default API uses its whole $99 plan; tuned Decodo and Scrape.do about two thirds](/uploads/blog/decodo-alternatives-100k-pages.png) | Route | What you run yourself | Usage | Invoice | |---|---|---|---| | Decodo Web Scraping API, `proxy_pool` left at the default | nothing | the whole $99 Business plan | $99 | | Decodo Web Scraping API, `proxy_pool` tuned per domain | per-domain pool config | about two thirds of the $99 plan | $99 | | Decodo residential, raw HTML for all 20 domains | scraper, retries, fingerprints, CAPTCHAs | about 16 GB | $64 (pay as you go) | | Decodo residential, a browser on the 8 JavaScript-heavy domains | all of the above plus a browser fleet | 32 GB (images and media blocked, HTTP Archive medians) to 150 GB (full loads, our measured median) | $128 to about $480 | | Scrape.do, at our test settings | nothing | about two thirds of the $99 Pro plan's credits | $99 | *Extra residential traffic is priced at the $4 pay-as-you-go rate, because Decodo doesn't publish its top-up price.* Decodo's tuned API and Scrape.do at our test settings land on the same $99 with the same headroom: about 1.5x these pages fit in the plan. Untuned Decodo fills its plan to the last cent, and with no documented top-up the next step is the $249 plan. Raw HTML through residential proxies is the cheapest line on the table, and it's real if your pages render server-side. It stops being real on the 8 domains that need JavaScript, where the bill grows two to seven times, before you count the retries and the engineering the API rows include. **Your domain list decides the cheapest route.** On Amazon, Walmart, eBay, YouTube or Booking, Scrape.do is about 10x cheaper per page than Decodo. On LinkedIn and G2 it's the other way round: Decodo is 2 to 3 times cheaper there. ## Web Scraping API Alternatives to Decodo For readers replacing Decodo's Web Scraping API, or replacing proxies plus their own scraper with one endpoint. Of the six APIs we ran against it, two beat Decodo's success rate by more than a few points. ![Scatter of 7 scraping APIs on the same 18 domains: Scrape.do about 4x faster than Decodo and nearly every page delivered](/uploads/blog/decodo-alternatives-api-benchmark.png) ### 1. Scrape.do ![Scrape.do dashboard playground with super proxy, geo targeting and JavaScript render options](/uploads/blog/scrapedo.png) Nearly every page delivered on the 18 domains, about 4x faster than Decodo on average, and about a quarter cheaper per successful page. Scrape.do is a scraping API that charges per request, doesn't charge for blocks, and applies the configuration each domain needs on its side. A Google request goes out on residential proxies and costs 10 credits whether you asked for them or not. An Amazon product URL goes through the Amazon Scraper API at 1 credit. Most [per-domain costs are published](https://scrape.do/documentation/request-costs/), and the `Scrape.do-Request-Cost` header reports every call's cost: on our 18 domains, TripAdvisor, Indeed and Trustpilot billed 10 credits without being listed. For proxy buyers, [Proxy Mode](https://scrape.do/documentation/proxy-mode/) takes the same token as a proxy URL (`proxy.scrape.do:8080`), so an existing proxy integration switches by changing one line. It bills per request from the same plan with unlimited bandwidth, so a 1.4 MB HTML document costs what a 50 KB one costs. A browser pulling every script and image through Proxy Mode pays for each of those requests, so it suits HTML fetching. #### Pros - Fastest on average in our test: about 4x faster than Decodo (almost 3x at the median), and faster on 16 of the 18 domains. - Every domain passed, nearly all of them on every request, including Capterra, Bing, eBay and Indeed, where Decodo missed most or all pages. - Blocks are free: a target's 401, 403 or 429 and any 5xx cost nothing. 2xx, 400, 404 and 410 are billed. - No pool to choose and no premium default: each domain's configuration is applied for you and its cost shows in the response header. - Proxy Mode replaces per-GB metering for teams that keep their own scraper. - 1,000 free credits a month with no card and every feature enabled. #### Cons - Not cheaper everywhere. LinkedIn costs 30 credits and G2 25, so pages there cost 2 to 3 times Decodo's price. Several domains moved to 10 credits since May (three of them, TripAdvisor, Indeed and Trustpilot, aren't in the published table yet), which roughly quadrupled our average cost per request since May. - Best Buy worked about half the time at our test setting: without `geoCode=us`, some requests land on Best Buy's country picker, a 200 that's billed like a page (10 credits each). With `geoCode=us`, every test request worked. Decodo got every Best Buy page without extra parameters. - The $29 plan allows 10 concurrent requests. At about 4 s per call that's fewer requests per second than Decodo's 10 req/s on the $19 plan. - Proxy Mode is not a raw residential proxy: it terminates TLS, so your client has to trust Scrape.do's CA certificate or skip verification. - Sessions close after 5 idle minutes, and targeting stops at country, region and ZIP code. Decodo's residential proxies hold an IP for up to 1,440 minutes and target cities and ASNs. #### Decodo vs Scrape.do Nearly every page against four in five, about 4x faster, and about a quarter cheaper per successful page on the same 18 domains. Decodo wins Best Buy out of the box and costs less per page on LinkedIn, G2, Google and TripAdvisor. The full side-by-side is on the [Decodo vs Scrape.do comparison page](https://scrape.do/compare/decodo-vs-scrapedo/). *What you keep:* one endpoint, HTML or Markdown output, structured APIs for Amazon and Google, async batches, a free tier. *What you lose:* day-long sticky sessions, city and ASN targeting, and an AI toolset (hosted MCP server, three SDKs, a CLI) as broad as Decodo's. ### 2. Bright Data ![Bright Data Web Unlocker playground in the Bright Data dashboard](/uploads/blog/bright-data.png) More than nine pages in ten on the 18 domains, at about Decodo's average speed, for about a fifth more per successful page, and no domain below seven in ten. Bright Data is the one vendor that replaces both halves of Decodo: an Unlocker API at a flat $1.50 per 1,000, scraper APIs and datasets, and residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies. It's the like-for-like swap if you use Decodo as a one-stop shop. #### Pros - One flat price per 1,000 on the Unlocker API ($1.30 on the $499 plan), billed on success only, so there's no pool to get wrong. - Unlimited concurrency and no requests-per-second cap. Decodo caps its regular plans at 10 to 50 requests per second. - No domain below seven in ten in our run, and every page on Bing, eBay and Indeed, three of the four domains where Decodo failed. - 5,000 free Unlocker requests a month, no card. #### Cons - About Decodo's speed on average, and a little slower on a typical request. - Google and Capterra worked seven times in ten at the configuration that qualified in May. Google may have been hurt by our own naive-call test, which sent the same query at the same time. - Residential lists at $8/GB pay as you go ($4 with the current coupon), against Decodo's $4. - Runs its own KYC for residential access, so the restricted-target friction comes along. #### Decodo vs Bright Data It misses about a third as often as Decodo, at about the same average speed, for about a fifth more per successful page. You pay a little more per page and stop thinking about pools, rate caps and plan steps. More detail in our [Bright Data alternatives](https://scrape.do/blog/bright-data-alternatives/) review. *What you keep:* proxies and an API under one account, every proxy type, enterprise compliance. *What you lose:* Decodo's lower per-GB prices and its 20-for-20 run on Best Buy. ## Residential Proxy Alternatives to Decodo For readers who want to keep running their own scraper and only change the proxy network. Our lab doesn't benchmark proxy pools, so success rates and response times below are [Proxyway's](https://proxyway.com/best/residential-proxies) (updated October 1, 2026), and prices are our captures from October 5. At 10 GB of US traffic, Decodo's $3.50/GB is cheaper than all three picks here. The reasons to switch are the terms, the pool and the country mix. ### 3. IPRoyal ![IPRoyal dashboard with residential proxy hostname, port and username settings](/uploads/blog/iproyal.png) A few points below Decodo on success and about twice as slow in Proxyway's test, 64M+ IPs in 195+ countries, about 1.5x Decodo's price per GB, and traffic that never expires. IPRoyal fixes the pain that fills Decodo's 1-star reviews: paying for gigabytes you don't use. Buy 10 GB in January and the unused part is still there in June. Pay as you go has no monthly minimum and no contract. #### Pros - Never-expiring traffic, so slow months don't cost you a renewal's worth of unused GB. - Low entry: 1 GB for $7.35 pay as you go, no subscription needed. - City-level targeting, and ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies on the same account. - A Web Unblocker from $1.00 per 1,000 requests if you outgrow raw proxies. #### Cons - Pricier per GB at small volume: $5.25 at 10 GB against Decodo's $3.50, about 1.5x. The $1.75 headline needs 10 TB. - Lower measured performance: a few points below Decodo on success and about twice as slow, by Proxyway's numbers. - The same ISP-quality complaint exists here: an r/proxies thread claims its "ISP proxies" are datacenter IPs. #### Decodo vs IPRoyal Stay on Decodo for performance per dollar at steady monthly volume. Move to IPRoyal when your usage is lumpy and expiring traffic is what you're actually paying for. *What you keep:* rotating and sticky residential, city targeting, every proxy type. *What you lose:* a few points of success rate and about half the speed, by Proxyway's numbers. ### 4. SOAX ![SOAX dashboard showing a residential proxy package and its traffic used](/uploads/blog/soax.png) Within a fraction of a point of Decodo on success and a little slower in Proxyway's test, 155M IPs, and one rate for residential and mobile traffic, priced by country tier. SOAX prices a gigabyte by where it exits. On the free Sandbox (pay per GB), Tier 1 countries such as the US cost $5.00/GB, Tier 2 $4.00 and Tier 3 $2.00. The $200 Builder plan drops that to $3.00, $2.25 and $1.20, and unused credits roll over for 60 days. #### Pros - Cheaper than Decodo outside the US and Western Europe: $2.25 and $1.20/GB on Builder for Tier 2 and 3 countries. - Mobile traffic at the residential rate. Decodo prices mobile separately: $2.75 to $3.75/GB on its monthly plans, and only thanks to a 50%-off promo ($5.50 to $7.50 at list). - 60-day rollover instead of losing traffic at renewal. - Near-Decodo performance in Proxyway's test. #### Cons - US and other Tier 1 traffic costs $5.00/GB on Sandbox and $3.00 on the $200 Builder plan, which matches Decodo's 50 GB rate. It undercuts Decodo's 100 GB price ($2.75) only from the $500 Team plan ($2.20). - No scraping API, so it replaces only the proxy half. - Pricing changed in July 2026 and third-party pages still quote the old plans; check the live page before you buy. #### Decodo vs SOAX Stay on Decodo if your traffic is US-heavy and steady. Pick SOAX for Asia, Latin America or Eastern Europe, or for mobile IPs at scale. *What you keep:* residential quality within a fraction of a point, sticky sessions, city targeting. *What you lose:* the cheapest US gigabyte, and the API. ### 5. Oxylabs ![Oxylabs Scraper APIs playground with website, scraper and URL fields](/uploads/blog/oxylabs.png) Level with Decodo on success and about as fast in Proxyway's test, 175M IPs, $30 for 5 GB. Read this one knowing the shared roots. Decodo and Oxylabs both grew out of Lithuania's Tesonet ecosystem, Decodo's CEO until March 2026 now runs the Oxylabs group, and Oxylabs owns Webshare and ScrapingBee. If you want to leave Decodo's orbit, Oxylabs may not count. #### Pros - The premium pool: top of Proxyway's ranking alongside Decodo, and the largest IP count of the five. - A Web Scraper API with per-target pricing (from $0.50 per 1,000 on Amazon) next to the proxies. - Enterprise contracts and account management for procurement-led buyers. #### Cons - The most expensive entry: $6/GB at 5 GB against Decodo's $3.75 at 3 GB, about 1.6x. - Shared roots and leadership history with Decodo, so it may not answer "I want a different company". - We couldn't re-test its API in October: every oxylabs.io host failed the TLS handshake from our network. In our May sweep its API cost about 10 times Decodo's price per request at its cheapest working configuration. #### Decodo vs Oxylabs For most buyers the difference is price: the same success for about 1.6x the entry price per GB. Pick Oxylabs if your procurement wants the premium name and an enterprise contract. More options in our [Oxylabs alternatives](https://scrape.do/blog/oxylabs-alternatives/) list. *What you keep:* the same network-quality tier, every proxy type, a scraping API. *What you lose:* the mid-market price, and any distance from Decodo's corporate orbit. ## Why Not Zyte, Webshare, NetNut or the Other Decodo Competitors | Provider | Why it's not in the five | |---|---| | Zyte | About Decodo's success rate on our 18 domains, no better, and no pages on Best Buy or G2; LinkedIn is on Zyte's forbidden-domains list (a 451 refusal). Its per-site price isn't known until the bill: from a quarter of Decodo's price per page to 3.5 times it. Strong for Scrapy teams; see our [Zyte alternatives](https://scrape.do/blog/zyte-alternatives/). | | Scrapfly | About Decodo's success rate in October (well ahead of it in May), at about 3x Decodo's cost per successful page, and most Amazon, Instagram and Zillow pages missed at its May configuration. Its anti-bot mode got all three in follow-up probes, at a higher price, and our network needed public DNS to reach its API. | | ZenRows | About Decodo's success rate, at about 4x the cost per page. | | ScraperAPI | About three pages in four at about 9x Decodo's cost per page, with none on Best Buy and TripAdvisor; Instagram and X are refused under its terms of use. | | Webshare | The cheapest datacenter and static IP lists (100 datacenter proxies for $2.99), but it's an Oxylabs company. Close to Decodo in Proxyway's test. | | DataImpulse | $1/GB flat, about a third of Decodo's price per GB and the lowest on Proxyway's list, close to Decodo on success in its test. | | NetNut | Its domains were seized by the FBI and IRS on July 2, 2026. Not an option. | | ScrapingBee | An Oxylabs company, and about 4x Decodo's price per request in our May sweep. | | Apify | A hosted platform of community scrapers, not a proxy network or a single endpoint. See our [Apify alternatives](https://scrape.do/blog/apify-alternatives/), where Decodo is one of the picks. | ## What to Pick? Five tools, two lanes. Pick the lane first. ### You Want to Stop Paying by the Gigabyte Scrape.do. Proxy Mode keeps your scraper and drops the metering, or the API drops the scraper too: nearly every page, about 4x faster than Decodo, and blocked requests cost nothing. ### You Want Decodo's One-Stop Shop, Somewhere Else Bright Data. Every proxy type plus a flat $1.50 per 1,000 unlocker and unlimited concurrency, at about Decodo's speed. ### You Keep Losing Unused Traffic IPRoyal. Never-expiring traffic and no monthly minimum, for about 1.5x Decodo's per-GB price at 10 GB. ### Your Traffic Exits Outside the US SOAX. Tier 2 and 3 countries from $1.20/GB on Builder, mobile at the same rate. ### You Want the Premium Pool and an Enterprise Contract Oxylabs, knowing its shared roots with Decodo. ### Stay on Decodo If... Your residential traffic is steady at 10 to 100 GB a month, your API targets clear on the standard pool and you set `proxy_pool` yourself, or your list leans on LinkedIn, G2 or Best Buy. None of the five picks beats Decodo's residential network on performance per dollar. ## The Bottom Line Decodo is two products, and they deserve different verdicts. The proxies are among the best you can buy at the price. Leave them for the terms (IPRoyal, SOAX) or an enterprise contract (Oxylabs); the network itself is hard to beat. The Web Scraping API is the weaker half in our test: it missed one page in five on our 18 domains, took about four times as long as the fastest alternative, and its price card assumes a pool you're not using by default. **On the same day and the same URLs, Scrape.do returned nearly every page, about 4x faster, for about a quarter less per page.** [Get 1000 free credits and start scraping with Scrape.do](https://dashboard.scrape.do/signup) ## FAQ ### Is Decodo the same as Smartproxy? Yes. Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo on April 22, 2025, and kept the company, the network and the accounts. smartproxy.com now redirects to decodo.com, and Decodo's help docs still cover the deprecated Core and Advanced scraping plans from the Smartproxy era. ### Is Decodo owned by Oxylabs? No public ownership link has been disclosed. Decodo and Oxylabs both grew out of Lithuania's Tesonet ecosystem, and Vytautas Savickas, Decodo's CEO until March 2026, became CEO of the Oxylabs group that month. Oxylabs owns Webshare and ScrapingBee. ### What is the cheapest alternative to Decodo? It depends on the half you're replacing. For residential proxies, DataImpulse at $1/GB undercuts Decodo's $3.50 on the 10 GB plan, while IPRoyal, SOAX and Oxylabs all cost more per US gigabyte. For the Web Scraping API, Scrape.do came in about a quarter cheaper per successful page than Decodo on our 18 domains; Zyte can be cheaper per page on easy sites, but it scored no better than Decodo and its price tier per site isn't known in advance. ### How much does Decodo charge for residential proxies? From $3.75/GB on the 3 GB plan ($11.25 a month) down to $2.75/GB at 100 GB, $2.00/GB on the 1 TB enterprise plan, and $4/GB pay as you go, all before VAT (captured October 5, 2026). Unused subscription traffic expires at renewal; pay-as-you-go traffic lasts 12 months. ### Does Decodo charge for failed requests? On the Web Scraping API, partly. Decodo's own 613 "unable to scrape" errors, 500s and 524 timeouts are free, but a non-empty 400, 401, 403, 404 or 429 from the target is billed: in our October run, nearly every Indeed response was a billed "401 Authenticating" challenge page. On the proxies every byte counts, 403 block pages included. Scrape.do doesn't bill 401, 403, 429 or 5xx responses, but it does bill a 200 that carries the wrong page. ### Do I need residential proxies or a web scraping API? Proxies, if you already run a scraper, need long sticky sessions or city-level IPs, and your pages are light HTML. An API, if you'd rather not run browsers, retries and fingerprinting yourself, or your targets need JavaScript: on our URLs a full browser load weighed about 30 times the compressed HTML, and a proxy bills every one of those bytes.