Bright Data vs Decodo 2026: Premium Pool or Best Price Per GB?

Decodo undercuts Bright Data at every published residential subscription volume — $3.50/GB on its 10 GB plan and $2.75/GB at 100 GB versus Bright Data's $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go — at published list prices (July 2026). Bright Data answers with scale: a 400M+ monthly IP pool claim against Decodo's 115M+ (both vendor claims) plus the Web Unlocker ecosystem, but its residential network is open only to registered companies that pass a human-reviewed KYC. If you cannot clear that gate, the price table is moot and Decodo wins by default.

Bright Data vs Decodo at a glance

This is the classic premium-versus-value matchup, and both providers are credible picks for legitimate data collection. Every figure below comes from the providers' own pages as displayed on July 17, 2026.

Sources: Bright Data residential pricing, Decodo residential pricing (as displayed July 17, 2026).

Engineer’s take (Hinata): Settle two binary questions before comparing a single rate: can you pass Bright Data's company-only KYC, and does VAT apply to your billing country — either one can flip this table by itself. I would budget Bright Data at its $8.00/GB list price and treat the $4.00 promo as upside, because a forecast built on a discount with no stated end date is a cost line that can double overnight. And before committing to a Decodo tier, I would burn the 3-day trial measuring how many bytes a successful page really costs once retries fire — buy a plan on a guess and you will likely half-use it at double the true per-GB rate.

A quick branding clarification: if you last shopped this matchup as Bright Data vs Smartproxy, Decodo is the same company under a new name. Smartproxy adopted the Decodo brand on April 22, 2025, and Decodo's rebrand page states that accounts, subscriptions, pricing, endpoints, and billing were all unaffected by the switch. Plenty of "Bright Data vs Smartproxy" comparisons are still circulating with pre-rebrand prices — check any number you find elsewhere against the current pages before acting on it.

Pricing: Decodo wins every published tier

According to Bright Data's residential proxies page (July 2026), pay-as-you-go traffic costs $4.00/GB with no commitment — displayed as a 50%-off promotion from an $8.00/GB list price. Its subscriptions (also shown at 50% off) start high:

Decodo's published ladder (all prices +VAT) is far denser at the low end:

Worked out at three realistic volumes, using each provider's cheapest published route:

Three caveats keep this honest. First, VAT: Decodo lists every price as excluding it, and at 10 GB a 20% VAT lifts its $35 plan to $42 — above Bright Data's $40 pay-as-you-go. At 100 GB the same 20% VAT gives $330, still well under $400, so the crossover only matters at small volumes. Second, Bright Data's tier geometry: its $499/mo plan buys 141 GB at $3.50/GB, so if your usage reliably lands between about 125 and 141 GB it beats Bright Data's own pay-as-you-go — but at exactly 100 GB, pay-as-you-go is $99 cheaper than the plan. Third, the 500 GB row uses a bracket because Decodo publishes only the endpoints of its enterprise range, not the 500 GB point, and Bright Data's honest listed route is the $1,999 plan — its 332 GB tier is too small, overage rates are unpublished, and pay-as-you-go would cost $2,000.

Where Bright Data genuinely wins on billing shape: its $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go carries no VAT annotation on the page we fetched, so for a non-EU buyer running irregular bursts, Bright Data matches Decodo's pay-as-you-go sticker and beats its VAT-inclusive price. For the four-provider version of this math, see our proxy pricing comparison; for the budget-first ranking, see cheapest residential proxies.

Pool scale and performance claims

Bright Data claims 400M+ monthly ethical residential IPs across 195 countries; Decodo claims 115M+ ethically-sourced IPs in 195+ locations. Both are vendor claims with no independent audit, and "monthly IPs" counted over a month is not directly comparable to a point-in-time pool figure. For context, Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026 (data collected March-April 2026, 13 providers benchmarked) puts the median advertised residential pool at 54M IPs — both providers advertise above that median, Bright Data by roughly seven times.

Directionally, the gap matters most for workloads that exhaust IP diversity: very large crawls of a single target, or country-level collection in thin markets where a smaller pool means more IP reuse. The same Proxyway report cites Bright Data at roughly $300M annualized revenue growing 50% year over year on AI demand.

On speed, the claims flip. Decodo publishes an under-0.5 s average response time and a 99.92% success rate with 99.99% uptime; Bright Data cites about 0.7 s and 99.95% success. All are vendor-measured figures against vendor-chosen targets, and ProxyFacts has not yet benchmarked either network. I would not choose between a 99.92% and a 99.95% claim — I would run both trials against my own target list and compare success rates there, because that is the only number that predicts your retry bill.

Feature differences are minor by comparison: both cover country, state, city, ZIP, and ASN targeting at no extra cost, with Decodo also listing continent-level targeting; both support HTTP(S) and SOCKS5; Decodo documents sticky sessions from minutes up to days, while Bright Data lists sticky and rotating sessions without a comparable published maximum on the page we fetched.

KYC and onboarding: the gate that decides it for solo developers

This is the section to read first if you are not a registered company, because for some readers it ends the comparison before price enters the picture.

Bright Data operates the strictest residential-access policy of the major providers. Per its KYC FAQ and network access documentation, residential network access is limited to verified companies that pass a human-reviewed KYC: you sign up as a registered company, verify a corporate email domain, and describe your use case, and the process may include an intro video call and government-issued ID of the point of contact. Its free trial requires no credit card, but production access to the residential network still sits behind that verification.

Decodo runs automated fraud checks, KYC verification, and third-party screening on every customer at registration, per its security and compliance page. Suspicious activity triggers third-party ID verification, which is also required to unlock restricted target groups, and the platform actively blocks high-risk targets — banking, government portals, streaming, app stores, ticketing. Onboarding is self-serve: a 3-day free trial with signup, plus a 14-day money-back option on eligible subscriptions.

The practical consequences:

1. Solo developers and unregistered teams: Bright Data may simply be un-onboardable — no corporate email domain, no residential access, whatever the price table says. Decodo's automated registration is the realistic path.
2. Registered companies with documented use cases: both gates open. Budget more calendar time for Bright Data's human review, and treat the process as a one-time cost against its scale advantages.
3. Anyone hoping to stay anonymous: neither provider is built for you, and we consider that a feature, not friction. Both compliance programs exist to keep abusive traffic off networks made of real people's devices. A use case that would not survive a KYC interview does not belong on a residential network.

Both providers' verification postures are covered in more depth in our Bright Data review and Decodo review.

Web Unlocker vs Site Unblocker: two billing models for hard targets

If your real goal is "fetch these pages successfully" rather than raw bandwidth, both vendors sell a managed unblocking product — but they bill on different axes, which changes the break-even.

Bright Data Web Unlocker is per-request: $1.50 per 1K requests pay-as-you-go, billed only for successful requests, with a free tier of 5K requests/month (no credit card) and a $499/mo Scale plan that includes 383K requests with overage at $1.30 per 1K, per its Web Unlocker pricing page (as displayed July 17, 2026). All plans include JavaScript/full-browser rendering, and Bright Data advertises a 98% success rate (vendor claim) plus a first-deposit matching bonus up to $500 (promotional, may be time-limited).

Decodo Site Unblocker is per-GB: $10.00/GB at 1 GB down to $6.75/GB at 100 GB, all +VAT, with a 14-day money-back option, per its product page (as displayed July 17, 2026); free-trial terms are unverified (not shown on the page fetched 2026-07-17). Decodo cites a 99.99% success rate and 195+ locations (vendor claims). Separately, unblocking logic is bundled into Decodo's Web Scraping API at per-request rates — $1.00-$0.85 per 1K premium-proxy requests, or $1.50-$1.20 per 1K with JS rendering, tier-dependent, with a 2,000-request no-card free plan.

The rule of thumb: heavy pages favor per-request billing (Bright Data's model absorbs page weight), while lightweight endpoints fetched in volume favor per-GB billing (Decodo's model absorbs request count). Bright Data's recurring 5K-requests/month free tier is the cheaper ongoing sandbox for testing hard targets. We compare these products across all four major vendors in our web unblocker comparison.

IP sourcing: cash-per-GB peers vs SDK rewards

Both networks are built from real users' devices, so how those users are recruited and paid is worth a paragraph each.

Decodo describes a peer-to-peer network in which end users opt in with informed consent and earn money calculated per GB of traffic they contribute (vendor claim, per its ethical sourcing page); no reward apps or SDK partners are named on the page we fetched, and ongoing peer-network monitoring plus an explicit peer opt-out right are unverified (not shown on the page fetched 2026-07-17). Decodo is an EWDCI co-founder with the EWDCI Certified designation.

Bright Data sources via app developers who embed the Bright SDK: the SDK activates only after an explicit end-user opt-in through a consent screen, developers must disclose participation and provide a two-click opt-out, and on iOS the SDK runs only while the host app is open (vendor claims, per its sourcing page). Compensation is in-kind rather than cash — rewards, fewer or no ads, virtual goods — and the ethical-sourcing claim rests on vendor self-attestation with no external audit shown. Notably, ethicalwebdata.com (fetched July 17, 2026) lists Oxylabs and Decodo among EWDCI members but does not mention Bright Data.

Neither model is independently audited, so treat both as vendor-described. If sourcing transparency drives your procurement, our ethical proxy sourcing guide compares the published policies side by side.

Which should you choose? By use case

If you are also weighing the other premium vendor, our Bright Data vs Oxylabs and Oxylabs vs Decodo comparisons run the same analysis on those pairings.

Our methodology

This is a document-based comparison. Every price, feature, and policy above comes from Bright Data's and Decodo's own published pages — pricing, KYC documentation, sourcing statements — fetched on July 17, 2026, plus Proxyway's dated 2026 market research for industry context. Performance figures, pool sizes, and success rates are vendor claims and labeled as such throughout; where a number is not published, we say so rather than estimate. ProxyFacts has not yet run first-hand benchmarks. ProxyFacts is monetized through disclosed affiliate partnerships; those partnerships never change which numbers we report.

Frequently asked questions

Which provider should a small registered company pick? Usually Decodo: at 10-100 GB/month its plans run $3.50 down to $2.75/GB (+VAT) against Bright Data's $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go, and there is no Bright Data subscription below $499/mo. Choose Bright Data when pool scale or the Web Unlocker's per-request model is the binding constraint and you can clear its KYC.

Does the 400M-vs-115M pool gap actually matter? Both are unaudited vendor claims counted on different bases, so treat the gap as directional. It matters most for high-volume crawls of single targets or thin geographies where IP reuse rises; for moderate price-monitoring and SEO workloads, either claimed pool is far above Proxyway's 54M market median.

What happens if Bright Data's 50%-off promo ends? Its page frames $4.00/GB as half of an $8.00/GB list price, with no stated end date. I would budget at list and treat the promo as upside; Decodo's published rates carry no promotional asterisk, though they exclude VAT.

Should I trust older Bright Data vs Smartproxy comparisons? Verify them first. Smartproxy became Decodo on April 22, 2025, with accounts, pricing, endpoints, and billing carried over unchanged per Decodo's rebrand page — but anything written before mid-2025 predates current pricing pages, so check every number against the live sites.

For the full comparison across all four major providers — including Oxylabs and IPRoyal — read our best residential proxies guide.