Bright Data vs Oxylabs vs Decodo vs IPRoyal vs Webshare: Which Should You Actually Pick?

We maintain a full provider comparison table with current pricing and sign-up links, but a table alone doesn’t tell you why one provider fits your situation better than another. This is the reasoning behind it - researched directly from each provider’s current pricing pages as of September 2026, since proxy pricing pages change often enough that stale numbers do more harm than good.

Two important corrections before we start

Two things changed recently enough that a lot of older comparison content online is now wrong:

Smartproxy is now Decodo. The company rebranded in 2025 - same infrastructure, same account credentials, same pricing, just a new name and domain (smartproxy.com → decodo.com). If you see “Smartproxy” referenced elsewhere, it’s the same company.
Bright Data has sunset mobile proxies for new customers. As of 2026, Bright Data’s own product pages list only residential, ISP, and datacenter proxies - mobile is no longer available to new signups, reportedly following an acceptable-use policy change around social media account management use cases. Existing customers can keep using it; new ones can’t sign up for it.

What actually differentiates these providers

Before the individual breakdowns, the things that matter most in practice:

Pricing model - per-GB (bandwidth-based, common for residential/rotating proxies) vs. per-IP (common for datacenter/ISP proxies, where you’re paying for a dedicated address rather than traffic volume).
IP pool size and type - a bigger residential pool generally means better success rates against sites with strong anti-bot detection, at a higher price than datacenter IPs.
Free trial or low-commitment entry point - whether you can test real traffic before committing to a plan.
Target customer - some providers are built for enterprise-scale usage with account management; others are built for a solo developer signing up with a credit card.

The five providers

Bright Data - the largest player, with by far the biggest residential IP pool (400M+ IPs) and the most granular geo-targeting of the group. Pricing is usage-based across residential, ISP, and datacenter proxies, running from roughly $4/GB for residential pay-as-you-go up to lower per-GB rates at high committed volumes. It’s built for scale - enterprise tooling, compliance features, dedicated support - which also means a steeper learning curve than the more beginner-oriented options here. Best fit: heavily protected targets and larger budgets, not casual/small projects.

Oxylabs - similar positioning to Bright Data: large residential pool (175M+ IPs across 195+ countries), strong reliability, and dedicated account support at scale. Residential pricing is usage-based starting in the mid-single-digit dollars per GB depending on plan tier; datacenter proxies are available both per-IP and per-GB, and ISP proxies are billed per-IP rather than by traffic (with a fair-use bandwidth cap per IP). Oxylabs still offers mobile proxies, unlike Bright Data. A free trial exists but is limited and generally one-time per customer. Best fit: similar use case to Bright Data - enterprise/business scraping and data collection - with slightly better documentation for self-service setup.

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) - the most approachable of the group for someone new to proxy management. Residential pricing is tiered by monthly volume, working out to roughly $2.75-$4/GB depending on commitment level, with a genuinely low-friction 3-day free trial (100MB, no long-term commitment) and a 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans. The IP pool (115M+ residential IPs) is smaller than Bright Data’s or Oxylabs’s, and advanced features cost more, but the dashboard and onboarding are noticeably simpler. Best fit: individuals and small teams who want to get started without an enterprise sales conversation.

IPRoyal - the most flexible on payment terms: genuinely pay-as-you-go with no subscription requirement, and accepts PayPal and cryptocurrency alongside cards. Residential proxies start around $1.75/GB, among the cheaper entry points in this group, with datacenter and ISP proxies priced per-IP instead. It also offers mobile proxies and a newer “Web Unblocker” product billed per request rather than per GB. The tradeoff is a smaller overall network than the top-tier providers and a more basic interface. Best fit: irregular or smaller-scale usage where a monthly subscription doesn’t make sense.

Webshare - the only provider here with a genuinely free tier (10 datacenter proxies, no credit card required), and the cheapest entry point for datacenter proxies specifically - fractions of a cent per IP at volume. It also offers static residential (ISP-style) and rotating residential proxies with a large pool (80M+ IPs across 195 countries), priced per-GB similarly to the other bandwidth-based options here. Best fit: developers who want to test scraping or automation workflows without paying anything up front, then scale up on datacenter proxies specifically.

Matching this to what you’re actually doing

If you’re testing an idea or scraping a handful of pages, start with Webshare’s free tier or IPRoyal’s pay-as-you-go model rather than committing to a subscription. If you’re newer to proxies generally and want a simple dashboard, Decodo is the easiest on-ramp. If you’re up against real anti-bot defenses (ticketing sites, major e-commerce, social platforms) at meaningful volume, Bright Data or Oxylabs are built for exactly that, at a corresponding price.

See the full comparison table for current pricing and sign-up links, or our guide to matching providers to web scraping specifically if that’s your primary use case.

A note on pricing accuracy: every number above was checked directly against each provider’s own pricing page in September 2026. Proxy pricing changes - sometimes without notice, and dashboard pricing occasionally differs from marketing-page pricing even on the same provider’s site - so treat these as a starting reference for comparison, not a quote, and confirm current pricing on the provider’s own site before buying.