Decodo vs SOAX: 2026 Head-to-Head Comparison
Decodo vs SOAX: 2026 Head-to-Head Comparison
Decodo (the rebrand of Smartproxy, completed in 2023) and SOAX are two providers that keep coming up whenever someone asks me about residential or mobile proxies for serious operational work. They’re not in the same tier as the budget throwaway providers, and they’re not at the enterprise-only price point of Bright Data either. They sit in a useful middle ground, which is exactly why comparing them matters.
The short version: Decodo wins on raw pool size, pricing per GB, and developer experience. SOAX wins on mobile proxy quality, pool filtering, and rotation granularity for mobile specifically. If you’re running high-volume residential scraping where cost efficiency matters, Decodo is the easier pick. If your work depends on clean mobile IPs, whether that’s app testing, social platform management, or anything where carrier-grade authenticity matters, SOAX earns its premium. My full Decodo review and full SOAX review go deeper on each individually, but this piece is for people trying to decide between them directly.
One caveat before anything else: proxy pool quality changes month to month. Both vendors update their networks, pricing structures, and dashboards regularly. The figures here reflect what I’ve observed and tested as of May 2026. Always verify current pricing on the vendor’s own checkout page before committing to a plan.
TL;DR comparison table
| Feature | Decodo | SOAX |
|---|---|---|
| Residential pool size | 65M+ IPs | 8.5M+ IPs (filtered) |
| Mobile proxy pool | Available, smaller focus | Core product strength |
| ISP proxies | Yes | Yes |
| Datacenter proxies | Yes | Yes |
| Entry-level residential pricing | ~$2.20/GB | ~$3.50/GB |
| Sticky sessions | Up to 30 min | Up to 60 min |
| Rotation control | Good | Excellent (esp. mobile) |
| Geo targeting depth | Country, state, city | Country, state, city, ASN, ISP |
| API/developer tooling | Excellent | Good |
| Dashboard UX | Modern, clean | Functional |
| Support | 24/7 live chat | 24/7 live chat |
| Best for | Scraping at scale, price-sensitive ops | Mobile use cases, filtered pool quality |
Decodo at a glance
Decodo launched as a brand in 2023 when Smartproxy decided to consolidate and rename its consumer-facing proxy products. The underlying infrastructure was built up over years under the Smartproxy name, so there’s nothing green about this provider. The residential pool sits at over 65 million IPs spanning 195+ countries. The network is ethically sourced via SDK partnerships, which is standard for the tier.
What makes Decodo stand out is the combination of pool size and developer experience. The dashboard is clean, the API documentation is well-organized, and the onboarding flow doesn’t punish you for being technical. You can generate proxy lists, set rotation parameters, and integrate via username/password or IP whitelisting without navigating confusing UI layers.
Pricing starts around $2.20/GB on the residential side for smaller plans and drops with volume. For a Singapore-based operator who does a fair amount of e-commerce price intelligence and SERP monitoring, the per-GB pricing has made Decodo a default choice for high-volume residential tasks. The datacenter proxies are also competitively priced and usable for less detection-sensitive tasks.
One limitation worth naming: while Decodo offers mobile proxies, it’s not the core product the way it is at SOAX. The mobile pool is smaller and the rotation tooling for mobile is less granular.
SOAX at a glance
SOAX has been around since 2019 and has built its reputation around pool quality over pool size. They advertise a residential pool of around 8.5 million IPs, which sounds small next to Decodo’s 65M, but the pitch is that every IP in the pool goes through active quality filtering. Dead IPs, flagged IPs, and abused addresses are cycled out regularly. For use cases where a smaller but cleaner pool outperforms a massive but inconsistent one, SOAX makes a reasonable argument.
The product SOAX is most serious about is mobile proxies. The mobile offering includes real 3G/4G/5G carrier IPs, with the ability to target by carrier (MNO), country, city, and ASN. That level of granularity is rare. If you’re doing anything that requires authentic mobile network fingerprints, whether that’s testing mobile app behavior, running accounts on platforms that perform carrier checks, or verifying mobile ads, SOAX’s mobile offering is genuinely differentiated.
Pricing is higher than Decodo across the board. Residential starts around $3.50/GB and mobile can run higher depending on the plan. SOAX does offer pay-as-you-go options which reduce commitment risk, but the per-GB cost will be a dealbreaker for cost-sensitive operations. For work where you need to hit multi-account management workflows at scale, that per-GB gap adds up quickly.
Head-to-head
IP pool size
Decodo: 65M+ residential IPs. SOAX: ~8.5M residential, with a separately maintained mobile pool. On raw numbers, Decodo wins by a wide margin. For scraping jobs where you’re burning through IPs at high velocity and need geographic spread, more IPs means fewer repeat assignments and lower block rates. That said, pool quality matters too. A provider with 65M IPs where 20% are dead or flagged is worse than one with 8.5M that are all verified active. In practice, Decodo’s pool is solid, not just large. But if pool cleanliness is your top concern, SOAX’s filtering argument is credible.
Rotation control
Both providers offer automatic IP rotation on each request (the default for residential) and sticky sessions that persist an IP for a set window. Decodo offers sticky sessions up to 30 minutes. SOAX goes up to 60 minutes for sticky residential and also provides more granular controls on the mobile side, including the ability to pin to a specific carrier for the duration of a session. For most scraping work, 30 minutes is enough. For workflows that require persistent sessions, like account logins or multi-step checkout flows, SOAX’s longer sticky window and finer controls are a meaningful advantage.
Geo coverage
Decodo covers 195+ countries with state and city-level targeting available in most major markets. SOAX covers a similar footprint but adds ASN and ISP-level targeting, which is useful if your target site or platform does IP scoring based on autonomous system reputation rather than just geography. For standard country/city targeting needs, both are equivalent. For anything more surgical, SOAX’s ASN targeting is a real tool.
Connection success rate
This is hard to measure cleanly without controlled testing on identical targets, and success rates vary by target site, not just provider. From my own use across e-commerce scraping and SERP monitoring: Decodo residential performs well on general web targets, with success rates in the 95-98% range on well-configured scrapers. SOAX residential is comparable. On mobile-specific targets, like app APIs or platforms that check carrier metadata, SOAX’s mobile proxies noticeably outperform because the IPs carry authentic carrier signatures that pass checks Decodo’s mobile pool sometimes fails. SOCKS5 proxy authentication behavior also plays into this, and both providers support it correctly.
Speed
Both providers are fast enough for production scraping. Neither will be your bottleneck unless your target site has rate limits or your own infrastructure is slow. Decodo has well-distributed entry nodes in major regions including Southeast Asia, which matters for latency when I’m running jobs from Singapore. SOAX is similarly distributed. No meaningful winner here.
Pricing per GB
Decodo wins this category clearly. At comparable plan sizes, Decodo is roughly 35-50% cheaper per GB on residential. For high-volume operations where you’re consuming 100GB+ per month, that difference is significant. SOAX is priced for users who value quality over quantity, and there’s a legitimate use case for that, but if cost efficiency is a priority, Decodo is the better fit. Keep an eye on both vendors’ current pricing pages since both run promotions and adjust rates periodically.
Session persistence
SOAX: up to 60 minutes for sticky residential, with mobile session pinning by carrier. Decodo: up to 30 minutes. SOAX wins for workflows that need long-lived sessions. Decodo is sufficient for most scraping use cases where sessions don’t need to last more than a few pages.
Concurrent connections
Both Decodo and SOAX allow high concurrent connections on paid plans, with no hard cap advertised for enterprise tiers. Decodo’s documentation makes it easier to test concurrency limits before you hit them, and their infrastructure handles burst traffic well. SOAX handles concurrency fine but the documentation on limits is less transparent. For very high concurrency scraping, I’d lean Decodo simply because of the better tooling visibility.
Use-case verdicts
High-volume web scraping and price intelligence Winner: Decodo. Lower per-GB cost, large pool, solid rotation, good API. For jobs that burn through gigabytes per day, Decodo’s pricing structure is the practical choice. You’re not sacrificing quality, you’re just paying less for it.
Mobile app testing and carrier-sensitive platforms Winner: SOAX. The ability to target by specific mobile network operator (MNO) and get IPs that carry authentic carrier signatures makes SOAX the right tool here. This is particularly relevant for teams testing how apps behave across different carrier environments, or running accounts on platforms that perform network-layer checks. If you’re deep in this kind of work, the anti-detect and browser fingerprinting ecosystem also matters alongside your proxy choice.
Social platform account management at scale Winner: it depends. For residential-based account management where volume matters, Decodo’s cost efficiency helps. For platforms that specifically check mobile carrier data, SOAX’s mobile proxies are better. I’d split the two: use Decodo for residential-based accounts, SOAX for any account that needs a mobile carrier IP.
ISP proxies for e-commerce checkout and ad verification Winner: Decodo. The ISP proxy offering is solid, the pricing is competitive, and the pool is large enough that IP recycling doesn’t create problems at moderate volumes. SOAX offers ISP proxies but at higher cost and with a smaller pool in this category.
Who should pick Decodo
Pick Decodo if your primary need is residential proxy volume at a reasonable price. If you’re running scrapers at scale, doing SERP monitoring, price intelligence, or any data collection job where per-GB cost matters and you don’t have specific mobile carrier requirements, Decodo is the more practical choice. It’s also the better pick for teams that want good developer documentation and a clean API integration experience. The Decodo review on this site covers their datacenter and ISP products in more detail if those are relevant to your stack.
Decodo also makes sense if you’re already in the Smartproxy ecosystem from before the rebrand, since it’s the same infrastructure and support team. The transition was smooth, and existing integrations weren’t broken.
Who should pick SOAX
Pick SOAX if mobile proxies are central to your work. The carrier-level targeting and pool filtering are genuinely differentiated in this category. If you’re doing anything that requires authentic 4G/5G carrier IPs, whether that’s mobile ad verification, app API testing, or running accounts on platforms with carrier-layer detection, SOAX is the better tool. The SOAX review on this site goes deeper on their mobile-specific features and how to configure carrier targeting.
SOAX also makes sense if you prioritize pool cleanliness over pool size and you’re hitting targets that are particularly good at blocking low-quality residential IPs. The filtering argument is real, even if the pool is smaller. And if your workflows require sticky sessions longer than 30 minutes, SOAX’s 60-minute window is a practical advantage that Decodo can’t match.
Finally, SOAX suits teams with budget flexibility who would rather pay more for a smaller, cleaner pool than optimize for cost. If you’re doing high-value verification or testing work where a few hundred dollars per month difference doesn’t change your economics, SOAX’s quality positioning is worth the premium.
Verdict overall
Neither vendor is universally better, which is genuinely true rather than a hedge. The honest breakdown is this: Decodo is the better default for most scraping and data collection operations because of its pool size, per-GB pricing, and developer experience. SOAX is the better choice specifically for mobile proxy use cases and for teams where pool filtering matters more than volume.
For a mixed operation, which is most realistic, running Decodo for residential scraping volume and SOAX for any mobile-specific tasks is a legitimate split. The overhead of managing two vendors is minimal if your infrastructure is already set up for proxy rotation via endpoint switching. Decodo’s documentation and SOAX’s documentation both support standard username/password authentication, making it straightforward to switch between them per task type.
If forced to pick one: for most operators reading this, Decodo is the pragmatic starting point. You can always add SOAX for mobile when you need it.
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 2026-05-19.