Decodo vs Smartproxy: 2026 Head-to-Head Comparison
People email me some version of “Decodo vs Smartproxy, which one” as if it’s Oxylabs vs Bright Data. It isn’t that kind of comparison. Decodo is Smartproxy. Same company, same residential and mobile IP network, same account team, different name on the invoice. If you signed up for Smartproxy any time before late 2024 and haven’t logged back in since, the product you’re using today is Decodo, whether you’ve noticed the rebrand or not.
I run scraping-heavy client work out of Singapore, and I’ve had accounts under both brands, which is really just one account that changed its logo partway through. So this isn’t a “which company wins” piece. It’s a “what actually changed, and does it matter to you” piece. The underlying network didn’t get better or worse overnight because of a rename, but pricing pages, plan names, and the dashboard did change. If you’re comparing quotes, reading old reviews, or deciding whether to migrate off a legacy plan, those details matter more than the logo.
Here’s the verdict up front, before the table: if you’re a new buyer, you don’t have a choice, you’re signing up as Decodo, full stop. If you already hold a Smartproxy contract with grandfathered pricing, there’s a genuine decision about whether to stay put or move to current Decodo tiers. That’s the actual comparison this article makes, not a fight between two companies that don’t exist separately.
TL;DR comparison table
| Decodo | Smartproxy | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Current published rates on decodo.com; pay-as-you-go and subscription tiers across residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP proxies | Same rate cards existed under this name pre-rebrand; there’s no active checkout under “Smartproxy” anymore, only legacy dashboards |
| Features | Residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP proxies, Web Scraping API, Site Unblocker, Core dashboard, browser extension | Identical feature set as of the 2024 rebrand, because it’s the same product |
| Support | 24/7 live chat and email, account managers on higher-volume plans | Same support desk and staff, now answering under the Decodo name |
| Target user | Anyone signing up today, or any existing user checking their current dashboard | Only relevant if you’re on an unmigrated legacy contract or reading an outdated review |
Decodo at a glance
Decodo, the current name for Smartproxy’s proxy network, is a Vilnius, Lithuania-headquartered provider selling residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP (static residential) proxies, plus a Web Scraping API and a Site Unblocker product built for JavaScript-heavy targets like search engines and social platforms. It’s built for scraping teams, ad verification shops, retail and sneaker bot operators, and general data collection, not consumer VPN users looking to watch region-locked streaming.
The dashboard, branded “Core,” handles proxy generation, usage tracking, and endpoint management. It supports rotating and sticky sessions, geo-targeting down to city level in major markets, and both HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 proxy connections, the latter running the same protocol standardized by the IETF in RFC 1928. HTTP proxying works through the CONNECT method described in RFC 9110, same as every other proxy provider in this category.
Pricing runs on a mix of pay-as-you-go and monthly subscription plans, tiered by GB commitment, with the effective per-GB rate dropping as your commitment rises. That’s the standard structure across this tier of provider, Bright Data and Oxylabs price the same way. Check the live pricing page before you budget anything, because these numbers move every couple of quarters and I’d rather send you to the source than print a figure here that’s stale by the time you read it.
Smartproxy at a glance
Smartproxy built its reputation between roughly 2018 and 2024 as one of the more affordable premium residential proxy providers, competing against Bright Data (then still called Luminati) and Oxylabs on price while matching most of their core features. It marketed a residential pool in the tens of millions of IPs across more than 190 countries for most of that run, undercutting the two market leaders on entry pricing while still supporting sticky sessions, city-level targeting, and both a browser extension and API access.
Today “Smartproxy” only shows up in three places: old reviews and comparison articles that haven’t caught up, grandfathered dashboards for accounts that predate the rebrand, and search results for people who haven’t heard about the name change yet. If you land on the old smartproxy.com URL, you’ll find yourself funneled toward decodo.com, the same infrastructure sitting under a new brand. There’s no second company to sign up with. If a review site is still selling you “Smartproxy” as a live, purchasable product in 2026, that review is out of date, worth flagging as a data point on how carefully that site tracks its own category.
head-to-head
Since Decodo and Smartproxy are the same network, most of the axes below are identical by definition. I’m running through them anyway because “identical” is itself useful information if you’re trying to decide whether switching brands changes anything about your setup. It doesn’t, except on one axis.
IP pool size
Same pool, same network, same rotation infrastructure behind both names. Smartproxy’s long-standing marketing figure was in the tens of millions of residential IPs, a number that held fairly steady across several years of reviews and comparison posts. Decodo’s current site lists a larger figure, which tracks with normal network growth for a provider that’s been actively selling for another two years since the rebrand. Either way, pool size on its own is a weak signal, what matters is how many of those IPs are actually clean and unflagged against your specific target, which no vendor’s marketing page tells you.
rotation control
No difference. Both support rotating on every request or holding a sticky session for a configured duration, set either through a gateway port convention or an API parameter. If you’ve used Smartproxy’s rotation setup before, Decodo’s works the same way because it’s the same backend.
geo coverage
No difference. Country and major-city targeting across the same footprint, historically advertised at 100+ countries and likely broader now given normal network expansion. If a specific city or ISP-level target you need was covered under Smartproxy, it’s covered under Decodo, and vice versa, they’re the same edge nodes.
connection success rate
No difference, same infrastructure means the same mechanical success rate. Premium residential providers in this tier, Decodo, Bright Data, and Oxylabs among them, all advertise success rates in the high 90s under normal conditions. Take any single vendor’s headline percentage as a marketing floor, not a guarantee, and test against your actual target site before committing to a plan, because success rate varies enormously by which domain you’re hitting.
speed
No difference. Same backbone, same routing, same latency profile. There’s no version of “Decodo is faster than Smartproxy” that makes sense, since traffic under both names rides the same edge network.
pricing per GB
This is the one axis where a real difference can exist, and it’s contractual, not technical. Rebrands frequently come with updated pricing structures or new-customer promotions, so a legacy Smartproxy account might be sitting on either a genuinely better grandfathered rate from before a price change, or a now-outdated rate that’s worse than what current Decodo tiers offer new signups. I can’t tell you which situation you’re in from here. Log into your dashboard, note your current effective per-GB rate, and compare it against Decodo’s live published tiers before assuming either direction.
session persistence
No meaningful difference. Sticky session windows are configurable from a couple of minutes up to durations comparable to what Bright Data and Oxylabs offer on their residential plans, and that range predates the rebrand. If your scraper depends on holding the same exit IP for a login flow or a multi-step checkout, the ceiling on session length hasn’t changed.
concurrent connections
No difference. Concurrency limits are tied to your plan and thread allowance, not to which brand name is on the invoice. A migration from a legacy Smartproxy plan to an equivalent Decodo plan shouldn’t change how many threads you can run in parallel, assuming you match the tier.
use-case verdicts
Starting a new scraping project from scratch. Winner: Decodo. There’s no other option for a new signup, and you get the current API and dashboard instead of a legacy interface someone will eventually sunset.
You already have a Smartproxy account with a locked-in cheap rate. Winner: Smartproxy (your existing legacy plan). If your grandfathered per-GB rate genuinely beats the current Decodo tiers, and your API keys and rotation setup still work, there’s no reason to touch a working, cheaper setup. Re-verify the rate difference yourself rather than assuming, since it can run either way.
Multi-account operations pairing proxies with antidetect browser profiles, for sneaker cops, social account management, or ecommerce multi-storefront work. Winner: Decodo, since it’s the only live signup path, and the residential/mobile mix is what this kind of work typically needs for IP diversity per profile. If you’re building out that kind of setup, our sister site at multiaccountops.com/blog covers the antidetect-browser-plus-proxy pairing side in more depth than I’ll go into here.
Local SEO and local search rank tracking, where you need city-level or ISP-level geo-targeting to see what a real user in a specific postal code sees. Winner: tie, because the geo footprint is identical infrastructure under either name. I wrote a longer breakdown of what actually matters for this use case, including why generic country-level targeting isn’t enough, in our guide to the best proxies for scraping local search results.
who should pick Decodo
Anyone signing up today, full stop, since there’s no other option. Also anyone with an old Smartproxy account who hasn’t logged in for a while and wants the current dashboard, current documentation, and a support team that isn’t going to be confused when you reference a brand name that hasn’t been on their careers page in two years. If you’re evaluating this vendor against competitors, read our full writeup at proxyscraping.org/reviews/decodo for pricing detail and where it sits against Bright Data and Oxylabs on cost.
who should pick Smartproxy
Only people who already have an active, unmigrated Smartproxy account with pricing or contract terms that beat what’s currently published under Decodo, and who don’t want to risk breaking a working integration by touching API keys or rotation config during a migration. That’s a narrow group, and it shrinks every quarter as legacy plans get sunset or auto-migrated. If that’s you, our review at proxyscraping.org/reviews/smartproxy covers what the legacy product looked like and what to check before you let your account lapse into a forced migration.
verdict overall
“It depends,” and specifically it depends on one question: are you a new buyer or an existing account holder. New buyers have no decision to make, you’re on Decodo because that’s the only company that exists now, and worrying about the old name is wasted time better spent testing the actual proxy pool against your target site. Existing Smartproxy users have exactly one thing worth checking, whether your current per-GB rate beats what’s live on Decodo’s pricing page today, and if it does, there’s no urgency to move.
What I wouldn’t do is pay attention to any comparison, including older versions of this one, that treats these as two competing vendors with different networks. They’re not. The IP pool, the rotation engine, the success rates, and the support team are shared infrastructure with two different logos slapped on it depending on when you signed up. Spend your evaluation time on things that actually differ between providers, like Decodo versus Bright Data or Decodo versus Oxylabs, where the pools, pricing models, and geo coverage genuinely diverge. For a broader set of proxy comparisons and category guides, our blog has more of these head-to-heads, including scraping-specific picks like the LinkedIn scraping proxy roundup if that’s closer to what you’re actually trying to solve.
One caveat that applies regardless of which name is on your invoice: residential proxy networks source IPs from real consumer devices, and reputable providers only route traffic through devices where the end user consented via an SDK agreement, which matters both operationally (consented pools tend to be more stable) and under frameworks like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation if you’re processing data tied to EU residents through that network. This isn’t legal advice, just worth knowing before you assume all residential IPs are sourced the same way.
Written by Xavier Fok
disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-07-13.