Smartproxy Review 2026: Honest Pros, Cons and Pricing
If you searched “Smartproxy” and landed here, the first thing you need to know is that the name has changed. Smartproxy, the Lithuania-founded proxy network launched in 2018, rebranded to Decodo in 2024. The infrastructure, the IP pool, and most of the account dashboard carried over. The brand name did not. I still get asked about “Smartproxy pricing” and “Smartproxy vs Bright Data” every month from people running scraping jobs, rank trackers, and ad verification checks, so this review treats Smartproxy and Decodo as the same underlying service and calls out where the naming gap actually matters.
Who this targets hasn’t changed much regardless of the logo: growth teams doing price and inventory monitoring across e-commerce sites, SEO agencies rank-tracking search results across dozens of countries, ad verification shops checking what creative actually renders in different geos, and scraping engineers who’d rather rent a proxy network than build and maintain their own IP infrastructure.
Headline verdict: this is a competent, mid-to-large proxy network with a genuinely large pool and workable session control, but it isn’t the cheapest option at low volume, and anyone buying today needs to go in with eyes open about the rebrand. If you’re comparing it directly against the current product, I’d read this alongside our Decodo review and the Decodo vs Smartproxy comparison before you commit a card number.
what Smartproxy actually does
Under the hood, this is a multi-type proxy network: residential (rotating consumer IPs sourced through SDK/app partnerships), datacenter (shared and dedicated), ISP proxies (static residential-style IPs hosted on datacenter infrastructure, sitting between the two), and mobile proxies (carrier-assigned IPs). On top of the raw proxy pool sits a scraping API and a “site unblocker” product aimed at people who don’t want to hand-roll header rotation, JS rendering, or CAPTCHA handling for every target site.
Access works the way most proxy networks work: you authenticate against a gateway endpoint with either username/password credentials or an IP whitelist, and you can pull proxies as rotating-per-request or as sticky sessions that hold the same exit IP for a set window, typically up to 30 minutes on the residential plans. Protocol support covers standard HTTP/HTTPS tunneling (the CONNECT method that most proxy traffic actually rides on) plus SOCKS5, specified in RFC 1928, which matters if your scraper or client software only speaks SOCKS.
Geo targeting is granular down to city level in major markets, less so in smaller countries where the underlying IP pool is thinner. That’s normal for the industry, not specific to this vendor, but it’s worth checking country-by-country if your use case is hyper-local.
pricing
Pricing as of mid-2026, based on the current plan pages: residential proxies run on a pay-as-you-go rate of roughly $7 per GB with no commitment, dropping into committed monthly plans starting around $50 for 8GB (roughly $6/GB) and scaling down to somewhere in the $3-3.5/GB range on the higher-volume tiers (500GB+). Datacenter proxies are priced differently, per-IP on shared plans rather than per-GB, with entry plans in the low single digits per proxy per month. ISP (static residential) proxies are also sold per-IP, typically in the $4-8/IP/month range depending on how many you buy. Mobile proxies sit at the top of the price ladder, priced either per-GB at a premium or as IP rentals, reflecting how much more expensive real mobile carrier IP access is to source at scale.
There’s typically a short money-back window on new accounts (a few days), but terms on refunds and trial access shift often enough that I’d confirm the current policy on the checkout page rather than trust anything written here or anywhere else as gospel. Same goes for the per-GB numbers above, proxy vendors reprice frequently and I’d treat this section as directional, not a locked quote.
what works
IP pool breadth. The residential pool covers 195+ countries per the vendor’s own published numbers, which is enough depth for most SEO rank-tracking and ad verification work that needs coverage outside the usual US/UK/DE cluster. If your targets are niche markets in Southeast Asia or Latin America, this is one of the few networks with meaningful density there.
Straightforward integration. Gateway auth via user:pass or whitelisted IP, combined with standard HTTP/SOCKS5 support, means it drops into existing scraping stacks (requests, Puppeteer, Scrapy) without custom SDK work. That’s a real time saver versus proxy providers that force you through a proprietary client.
Sticky sessions that actually hold. Thirty minutes of session persistence on the same exit IP is enough to complete most login-and-scrape flows or multi-page checkout monitoring without the IP flipping mid-task, which is where a lot of cheaper rotating-only providers fall over.
Scraping API removes boilerplate. For teams that don’t want to maintain their own headless browser fleet, the site unblocker/scraping API handles JS rendering and adaptive header rotation, which cuts down the engineering hours needed to keep scrapers alive against sites that update their anti-bot rules regularly.
what doesn’t
Entry-volume pricing isn’t competitive. At $7/GB pay-as-you-go, this is more expensive per gigabyte than several smaller residential providers aimed at hobbyists and solo operators. If you’re only burning a few GB a month, you’re paying a premium for a network built for scale.
The rebrand itself is a real cost. Anyone with an old Smartproxy affiliate link, a bookmarked login page, or a two-year-old blog post recommending “Smartproxy” is going to hit friction figuring out that Decodo is the same company. Support tickets, invoices, and API docs all moved. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a genuine tax on anyone new to the space right now.
Support quality is inconsistent. Billing and account questions get quick live-chat answers. Anything that touches actual scraping troubleshooting (why is this specific target blocking me) tends to get routed to slower email support, and answers can be generic rather than target-specific.
Mobile proxies are thin relative to specialists. If your whole business is mobile-IP-dependent work, a mobile-specific provider is usually going to beat this on both price and pool depth. Singapore-based operators in particular are better served checking a carrier-focused option like Singapore Mobile Proxy before defaulting to a generalist network’s mobile tier.
You’re renting, not owning. Like nearly every shared proxy network, there’s no path to a permanently assigned static IP that’s yours for a year or more. If your use case needs the exact same IP address indefinitely (some banking or account-verification workflows do), this model doesn’t fit, and you’d be looking at dedicated hosting or a static IP lease instead.
who should buy
Mid-size scraping operations that need broad country coverage without standing up their own proxy infrastructure. SEO agencies tracking rankings across a wide country list. Ad verification teams checking creative rendering across geos. Price and inventory monitoring teams hitting e-commerce sites at moderate volume where the scraping API’s automatic handling of anti-bot friction is worth paying for.
who should skip
Solo operators or small side projects burning under 20-30GB a month, where cheaper per-GB pay-as-you-go competitors will save real money. Anyone needing a dedicated static IP for 12+ months. Teams whose core workload is mobile-carrier IPs, where a mobile specialist beats the generalist tier on both price and depth. And multi-account operators running dozens of persistent social or marketplace profiles that need proxy and browser fingerprint paired together long-term, that’s a different tooling problem, closer to what multiaccountops.com and antidetectreview.org cover, than a rotating proxy subscription.
alternatives to consider
Decodo directly — same infrastructure, current branding, and occasionally different plan pricing than what old Smartproxy links quote, so check it before assuming the numbers above still hold: see our Decodo review.
Bright Data — larger enterprise-grade pool with heavier compliance tooling, worth it if you need audit trails and dedicated account management, but the entry price point is higher.
SOAX or IPRoyal — smaller residential pools but noticeably cheaper per-GB entry pricing, a better fit for hobbyists and small scraping jobs where budget matters more than country depth; see our Decodo vs SOAX comparison for how that tradeoff plays out in practice.
verdict
Smartproxy, now operating as Decodo, is a capable proxy network with real geo depth and workable session control, and it’s a reasonable pick for mid-volume scraping, SEO tracking, or ad verification work. It’s not the cheapest entry point, support for technical issues is inconsistent, and the rebrand adds a layer of confusion that a newer buyer shouldn’t have to untangle alone. Do the math on your actual GB volume before committing, and read the full article index at /blog/ for how it stacks up against the other providers we’ve tested.
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 2026-07-21.