Oxylabs vs Smartproxy: 2026 Head-to-Head Comparison
I’ve bought proxies from both vendors, on and off, since 2021. Oxylabs and Smartproxy are two of the biggest names out of Lithuania’s proxy cluster (which also produced Nimble, IPRoyal, and a handful of smaller resellers), and they get compared constantly because they solve the same problem from opposite ends: Oxylabs sells to enterprises and treats everyone else as a rounding error, while Smartproxy built its reputation on being the affordable, self-serve option a solo scraper or small agency could sign up for with a credit card.
One thing worth flagging up front: Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo in October 2024. The product, network, and team didn’t change, but the brand name, domain, and dashboard did. I use “Smartproxy” here because that’s still how most people search for it, but if you land on decodo.com instead of smartproxy.com, you’re in the right place.
Short version of my verdict: if you’re running a scraping operation with real budget, dedicated infrastructure, and a need for account management and SLAs, Oxylabs is built for you. If you’re a smaller team or indie developer testing a workflow before committing serious spend, Smartproxy/Decodo gets you most of the same capability at a lower entry price with less friction. Neither is “wrong” — they’re built for different buyers.
TL;DR comparison table
| Oxylabs | Smartproxy (Decodo) | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Higher, historically had minimum commitments on some plans | Lower, self-serve, no minimum spend on most plans |
| Residential pricing | Roughly $8/GB pay-as-you-go before volume discounts | Roughly $6-7/GB pay-as-you-go before volume discounts |
| Datacenter proxies | Priced per IP or per GB, enterprise-oriented | Priced per GB, generally the cheaper option of the two |
| ISP proxies | Yes, static residential-ISP blend | Yes, static residential-ISP blend |
| Mobile proxies | Yes, carrier-grade 3G/4G/5G pool | Yes, smaller mobile pool |
| Residential pool size | Listed at 100M+ IPs on their site | Listed in the tens of millions on their site |
| Geo coverage | 195 countries claimed | 195 countries claimed |
| Rotation control | Granular: sticky sessions, per-request rotation, custom rotation intervals | Granular: sticky sessions, per-request rotation, session duration control |
| Support | Dedicated account managers on higher tiers, 24/7 live chat | 24/7 live chat, no dedicated AM below enterprise tier |
| Free trial | Limited trial on some products, requires sales contact for full trials | 3-7 day trial or small free tier depending on product |
| Target user | Enterprises, data teams, agencies with recurring high volume | Startups, indie developers, small-to-mid agencies |
Prices move often on both sites, so treat these as directional, not gospel. Check the live pricing page before you commit a card.
Oxylabs at a glance
Oxylabs was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Vilnius, one of the oldest and largest players in the commercial proxy space. It built its brand on scale and compliance rather than price. The lineup covers residential, datacenter, ISP (static residential), and mobile proxies, plus scraper APIs (Web Scraper API, SERP Scraper API, E-Commerce Scraper API) that abstract away much of the retry and parsing logic you’d otherwise build yourself.
Oxylabs is genuinely good at uptime and consistency at volume. Pulling millions of requests a month against hard targets (major e-commerce sites, search engines, travel aggregators), their infrastructure tends to hold up, and support escalation for a paying enterprise account is responsive. The tradeoff is friction and cost at the low end. Their better rates historically required a sales call and a minimum monthly commitment — a dealbreaker if you just want to test a scraper over a weekend. That’s loosened up with more self-serve plans, but Oxylabs still reads as a vendor built around annual contracts and account managers rather than a card swipe.
Smartproxy at a glance
Smartproxy (Decodo) launched in 2018, also out of Lithuania, positioning itself from day one as the more approachable alternative to Oxylabs and Bright Data (formerly Luminati). No minimum commitments on most plans, transparent pricing instead of “contact sales,” and a dashboard that gets you a working proxy endpoint within minutes of signup.
The product surface mirrors Oxylabs closely: residential, datacenter, ISP, mobile, and a scraping API. The residential pool is smaller by most public numbers, but for most use cases — price monitoring, ad verification, small-to-mid scraping, sneaker and ticket automation, SEO rank tracking — pool size at that scale stops being the bottleneck. What you feel day to day is the lower price per GB and going from signup to a working endpoint without talking to a salesperson. The Decodo rebrand hasn’t changed that positioning; it’s still the vendor I point people to when they want to try scraping cheaply first.
head-to-head
IP pool size
Oxylabs lists a residential pool north of 100 million IPs, among the largest advertised in the industry. Smartproxy/Decodo lists a smaller pool, generally cited in the tens of millions. Unless you’re running targets that ban aggressively and burn through IPs fast (major social platforms, high-security checkouts), a pool in the tens of millions is more than enough. Pool size matters most for high-concurrency scraping against defensive targets. Oxylabs wins on paper, but it’s the category least likely to matter for a typical buyer.
rotation control
Both vendors give you the standard toolkit: rotate on every request, hold a sticky session, or pin a session ID for as long as the upstream allows. Oxylabs’ controls are slightly more granular (explicit parameters for rotation intervals and stickiness), while Smartproxy’s dashboard is more visual and faster to configure without reading documentation. Both expose standard HTTP/SOCKS5 protocols, so rotation logic sits at the same layer regardless of vendor. For how proxy tunneling and the CONNECT method work at the protocol level, MDN’s proxy servers and tunneling docs are the clearest reference, and for SOCKS5 specifically, RFC 1928 is the spec both vendors implement against.
geo coverage
Both claim roughly 195 countries — effectively every country with meaningful internet infrastructure. The real differentiator is city- and ISP-level targeting depth where it matters to you. Oxylabs tends to have deeper city-level targeting in the US, UK, and major EU markets given its larger pool. Smartproxy covers the same top-tier countries well, but targeting thins out faster in smaller regions. Concentrated in US/EU/UK targets, this is close to a wash; need granular city targeting in smaller markets, Oxylabs has the edge.
connection success rate
This is the number that actually determines whether a proxy service is worth paying for, and it’s hard to verify from marketing pages since “99%+ success rate” claims are self-reported and target-dependent. In my own testing against common targets (search engines, general e-commerce, review sites), both vendors sit in a similar band — high-90s percent success on non-adversarial targets — with success dropping on both against sites running aggressive bot detection like Cloudflare’s managed challenge or PerimeterX. Oxylabs’ larger pool gives it a slight edge over long, high-volume runs since it has more fresh IPs to fall back on when a subnet gets flagged. For short bursts or lower volume, I haven’t seen a meaningful difference.
speed
Datacenter proxies from both vendors are fast — sub-second connection times, since they skip a residential ISP’s last mile. Residential and mobile proxies are slower on both, inherent to the medium, not a vendor failing. Oxylabs and Smartproxy residential latency has been close enough in my testing that I wouldn’t pick one over the other for speed alone. If raw speed is your priority and you don’t need residential-grade authenticity, datacenter proxies from either vendor will outperform residential proxies from either by a wide margin — a bigger lever than which vendor you pick.
pricing per GB
This is where the two vendors actually diverge. Oxylabs residential pricing starts around $8/GB pay-as-you-go, dropping with committed volume. Smartproxy/Decodo starts lower, generally $6-7/GB at entry, with its own volume discounts at scale. Datacenter proxies follow the same pattern: Oxylabs prices for enterprise budgets, Smartproxy for a wider range of buyers including hobbyists. Under a few hundred dollars a month, Smartproxy will almost always be cheaper for the same bandwidth. At high volume (multiple TB/month), the gap narrows as Oxylabs’ enterprise discount tiers get aggressive — and that’s where their account management becomes worth paying for.
session persistence
Both support sticky sessions — holding the same exit IP for a set window (typically 10-30 minutes depending on plan and proxy type), which matters for login states, multi-step checkouts, or cart persistence. Oxylabs generally offers longer maximum session durations on higher-tier plans; Smartproxy’s windows are shorter by default but configurable enough for most multi-step automation. If you’re heavy on maintaining a single session across many sequential requests (common in multi-account operations where one IP needs to persist across a whole login-and-action sequence per account), check the specific session duration cap on your plan rather than assuming — it varies most by tier on both sites.
concurrent connections
Concurrent connection limits scale with your plan on both vendors rather than being a fixed platform limit. Oxylabs’ enterprise tiers support very high concurrency, part of why they’re the default pick for large scraping operations running hundreds of parallel threads. Smartproxy’s concurrency scales with spend too, but the ceiling on entry and mid-tier plans is lower — fine for most small-to-mid jobs but a possible bottleneck on a starter plan running a large distributed scraper. If concurrency is your binding constraint, moving up a tier usually solves it rather than switching vendors, so check the specific plan’s cap before assuming either brand handles it “unlimited.”
use-case verdicts
Large-scale e-commerce and price-monitoring scraping: Oxylabs. The larger IP pool and higher concurrency ceiling matter when pulling data from hundreds of thousands of product pages daily across multiple retailers, and their Web Scraper API cuts a lot of the parsing and retry work out of the pipeline.
SEO rank tracking and SERP scraping on a budget: Smartproxy. Rank tracking is bandwidth-light and doesn’t need a massive pool, so the lower per-GB price wins outright. I’ve run rank-tracking jobs on Smartproxy’s residential plan without hitting meaningful blocks.
Ad verification and geo-testing campaigns: tie, leaning Oxylabs for deeper city-level targeting in smaller or less common geos; otherwise Smartproxy is fine and cheaper for standard US/EU/UK verification.
Airdrop farming, multi-account social automation, and similar “one clean IP per identity” workflows: Smartproxy, mainly on cost. These workflows are IP-count-heavy rather than bandwidth-heavy — you need many distinct, clean exit IPs, not huge data volume per IP — so the cheaper per-GB rate and lower barrier to entry favor Smartproxy at hobbyist or small-team scale. Worth reading up on the operational side, not just the proxy vendor, at airdrop farming’s blog, since the proxy is one piece of a broader identity-separation setup.
who should pick Oxylabs
Pick Oxylabs if you’re running a data operation with real, recurring volume (multiple terabytes a month or continuous high-concurrency scraping), need an account manager who picks up the phone, and price per GB matters less than uptime and support responsiveness. It’s also the better call if your targets skew toward smaller geographies where deeper city-level targeting changes your success rate. Our full Oxylabs review shows this pattern across most enterprise-focused feedback.
who should pick Smartproxy
Pick Smartproxy (Decodo) if you’re a solo developer, small agency, or team testing a scraping workflow before scaling spend. The lower entry price, no-minimum self-serve plans, and simpler dashboard make it the lower-friction choice, and for most bandwidth-light or moderate-volume jobs, the smaller IP pool won’t be a bottleneck you notice. Our full Smartproxy review covers the current plan structure if you want the breakdown before signing up.
verdict overall
There’s no single winner here, and I’d distrust any comparison that claims one. Oxylabs is the better product for buyers who’ve outgrown “testing” and are running real production volume where uptime, concurrency, and account support justify the higher price. Smartproxy is the better product for buyers who haven’t gotten there yet, or never will need that scale, and just want reliable proxies at a price that doesn’t require a sales call. My honest recommendation: if you’re not sure which camp you’re in, start with Smartproxy’s lower-commitment plans, and if you find yourself consistently hitting its concurrency or pool-size ceilings, that’s your signal to move up to Oxylabs rather than guessing upfront. Find more comparisons like this one on the blog.
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 2026-07-19.