Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) Review
Great proxies, affordable pricing plans, and fantastic 24/7 customer support make Decodo an attractive choice for most tasks.
Try Decodo Residential Proxies for free.
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) often appears among the top choices in our proxy lists. Historically, it was a stripped down version of the premium providers like Oxylabs and Bright Data – similarly performant but missing a feature here and there.
In 2024, Decodo is able to stand head-to-head with them, while still managing to compete with cheaper services like IPRoyal. This is no small feat – and one of the reasons why the company received our Best Value Provider award, four years in a row.
In this review, I’ll try to show what makes Decodo one of the best proxy services today – and whether you should choose it over the competition. Let’s go!
News about Decodo
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By Adam Dubois
- Provider News
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General Information
- Country: International
- Founded: 2018
- Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile, proxy API (Site Unblocker)
- Web scrapers: APIs for general unblocking, search engines, e-commerce & social media
- Supporting tools: Antidetect browser, Chrome & Firefox extensions
- Price segment: Mid-market
- Starting price: $7
- Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Apple Pay, Google Pay
- Trial: 3 days, 14-day refund
Decodo was founded in 2018 under the name of Smartproxy. It rebranded in April 2025.
The company started out in reaction to premium proxy providers like Luminati (now Bright Data) and GeoSurf (now shut down), which were only accessible to business customers and had cumbersome onboarding procedures.
The company first resold addresses from others. Nowadays, it has a diverse pool that combines proxies from various sources. According to Decodo, they’re carefully vetted, but the provider doesn’t go into much detail about the topic.
Decodo built its business on residential and rotating datacenter proxies. At the time, they managed to fill a gap between premium providers and cheap yet mediocre services like Storm Proxies. The IPs performed well while costing less than the high-end counterparts. It also helped that Decodo heavily invested into customer experience: quality documentation, responsive support, and user-friendly interface.
This, along with some targeted marketing efforts, allowed Decodo to quickly sweep up many of the sneakerheads, Instagram managers, and small-time scrapers that were looking for affordable residential addresses. While its website is still heavily oriented towards these audiences, the company has been gradually expanding its reach.
Today, Decodo can be considered one of the largest proxy providers, probably the third after Bright Data and Oxylabs. Rotating proxies remain the backbone of its service, but there are now more products to choose from, including several web scrapers.
Decodo Proxy Networks
Decodo sells access to all major types of proxy servers:
- Datacenter proxies in shared, dedicated, and pool-based formats.
- ISP proxies, which come in a dedicated list or a large rotating pool.
- Residential proxies with global country coverage.
- Mobile proxies from real people’s devices around the world.
- Proxy API (Web Unblocker) that integrates as a proxy server but handles unblocking and JavaScript rendering remotely.
This review covers the following proxy networks:
Rotating residential proxies are Decodo’s flagship service made for accessing strict websites.
Pool Size & Coverage
- Advertised pool size: 155 million
- Locations: Global
- Targeting options: Global, country, state, city, ZIP code
Decodo’s pool comprises 155 million IPs borrowed from real people’s devices. To give you some context, this is among the larger proxy networks on the market, at least looking at advertised numbers.
The residential proxy pool covers all countries in the world. You get precise filtering tools out of the box, which allow specifying a city and even ZIP code (though only in the US).
Features
- Rotation: Every request, up to 24 hours
- Traffic: Plan based
- Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
Decodo’s residential proxies can rotate with every connection request, and you can also establish sticky sessions. You can specify any duration up to 24 hours – of course, the real uptime depends on the IP source. The connection also drops if you stop making requests for a minute.
Decodo imposes no limitations on concurrency, meaning that you can make as many parallel requests as you like – or your hardware can handle.
Integration & Use
- Connection method: Gateway address
- Connection format
- Primary: USERNAME:PASSWORD@us.smartproxy.com:10001
- Secondary: user-USERNAME-country-COUNTRY-city-CITY-session-ID:PASSWORD@gate.smartproxy.com:7000
- Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
- Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelisting
Decodo’s residential proxy network uses gateway servers. They route requests through the closest load balancer before reaching the end user’s device.
You actually get two integration formats: endpoints with different port numbers and a single backconnect gateway.
Endpoints are the preferred method used in Decodo’s setup widget. They give you slightly different addresses based on the country you choose, and then generate ports for sticky sessions. This way, you don’t need to modify the username to target particular locations.
The endpoint approach also supports city targeting, though it’s not always consistent. Major cities like New York have their own designated ports (city.smartproxy.com:21000, 21001, etc.), but smaller designations still add a username parameter: gate.smartproxy.com:10001:user-USERNAME-country-us-city-kansas_city.
The backconnect entry always sticks to the same gateway, and you can filter IPs by appending parameters to the username. This method is more flexible, but it may not be compatible with scenarios where credentials can’t be used. It’s also the only means to use location targeting with SOCKS5.
Pricing Plans
- Model: Pay as you go, subscription
- Format: Pay per traffic
- Modifiers: Number of whitelisted IPs, sub-users
- Starting price: $7 for 1 GB
- Trial: 100 MB for 3 days or 14-day refund
Decodo’s residential proxies used to have the highest starting price out of the provider’s three proxy networks, but now you can pay as you go. It’s not cheap compared to competitors like Dataimpulse but beats most premium and mid-range alternatives. So, these residential IPs can be a viable choice for small projects that need quality addresses.
To avoid getting stuck between pricing tiers, Decodo allows topping up each plan at the same rate per gigabyte. This is limited to 80% of the plan’s worth, at which point it makes sense to simply buy a bigger plan.
The proxies can be a solid option for large projects, as well. Decodo scales very competitively into hundreds of gigabytes, and some premium options fail to catch up even at a terabyte of data.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Decodo’s residential proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
- Requests: Global pool – 1.2M, 21 days; country pools – 560k, 14 days; Australia – 140k, 7 days
- Residential percentage: IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)
* Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
#2: IP quality (IPQualityScore data)
- Global pool: 20,000 checks
- US pool: 10,000 checks
Decodo’s IPs were among the least abused, both in all locations and only the US. There were also very few proxies classified as frequent abusers, which suggests that the provider’s residential network is clean.
#3: Infrastructure performance
- Parameters: Same as the pool test
- Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
- Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools
#4: Performance with popular targets
- Requests: ~2,600 for each target
- Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper; social media – Puppeteer Extra Stealth
- Proxy location: US
- Our server location: US
Pool Size & Coverage
- Advertised pool size: 10 million
- Locations: Global
- Targeting options: Global, country, state, city, ASN, OS
Decodo advertises one of the larger mobile proxy pools on the market. It includes IPs in most countries around the world.
The product has particularly generous filtering options: you can choose not only a city, ASN, but also the desired device operating system. One caveat is that ASN and city filters can’t be used together – this is to keep the IP pool reasonably large.
Features
- Rotation: Every request, up to 24 hours
- Traffic: Plan based
- Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
The mobile proxy network supports several rotation options: IPs can change with every connection request, or they can last up to 24 hours before rotating. This isn’t guaranteed and depends on the end user’s availability. Once they go offline, you automatically get a new IP address – there’s no option to wait until the same IP returns.
Decodo doesn’t limit how many requests you can make at once, making these proxies a solid choice for large-scale web scraping, such as for ad verification purposes.
Integration & Use
- Connection method: Gateway address
- Formats
- Primary: USERNAME:PASSWORD@us.smartproxy.com:10001
- Secondary: user-USERNAME-country-COUNTRY-city-CITY-session-ID:PASSWORD@gate.smartproxy.com:7000
- Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
- Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelisting
Decodo’s mobile proxy network uses gateway addresses that route your requests to the end user and then the target website. You can choose from two integration formats:
1) Country endpoints. This is the default method that uses different gateways for countries and ports for sticky sessions. It’s handy when your software fails to support credential-based authentication.
2) Backconnect gateway. You get one address and port that never changes. Any filters, such as country or sticky session, are added as parameters to the username. This approach is more flexible but also harder to use.
In reality, the distinction isn’t always clear. For example, Decodo sometimes adds parameters to country endpoints when you choose cities. In addition, the backconnect method is necessary for country targeting with the SOCKS5 protocol.
Pricing Plans
- Model: Pay as you go, subscription
- Format: Pay per traffic
- Modifiers: More sub-users/whitelisted IPs
- Starting price: $8 for 1 GB
- Trial: 14-day refund
You can get Decodo’s mobile proxies by subscribing to a plan, which start from $15 ($7.5/GB). A plan lasts for a month and updates automatically. Or, you can pay as you go at a fixed rate of $8/GB.
Like most similar products, this one charges for traffic, otherwise giving you full access to the proxy network.
Compared to the broader market, Decodo’s rates are below average throughout most of the pricing range. All in all, you get a good deal for the package.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Smartproxy’s mobile proxies in March 2024.
#1: Pool size & composition
- Requests: 280k, 14 days; Australia – 140k, 7 days
- Mobile percentage: IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)
* Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
#2: Infrastructure performance
- Parameters: Same as the pool test
- Target: Nearest server of a global CDN
- Response size: < 10KB
- Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools
The mobile proxies had a high success rate overall, but there were hiccups in individual locations like Brazil or India. The same thing was apparently with response time: though fast in the Global pool, it slowed down when testing the same locations individually. Decodo’s routing logic may have been at fault here.
#3: Performance with popular targets
- Requests: ~2,600 for each target
- Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper; social media – Puppeteer Extra Stealth
- Proxy location: US
- Our server location: US
The proxies performed well with popular websites, though not as good as Decodo’s residential service. They were also half as fast – but that’s often the case with mobile IPs.
Datacenter proxies are Decodo’s entry option. They’re made for cost-efficient web scraping when your target doesn’t care about IP reputation or precise location targeting.
Decodo offers three datacenter products:
- A list of shared IPs with customizable traffic and ability to rotate.
- A list of dedicated proxies in the US.
- A large pool of rotating proxies in the US and Europe.
Features
The three proxy networks are pretty distinct in terms of features.
Decodo’s dedicated proxies – like most dedicated datacenter proxies – give you pretty much unlimited access to the IPs. They’re also the only proxy type to support full SOCKS5 – including the UDP protocol. However, there are two big caveats: the proxies don’t rotate and the only available location is the US, with no option to specify particular cities.
The 100,000-strong rotating proxy network gives you a lot of disposable IPs that you can simplify rotate away. Its choice of locations includes multiple major European countries like Germany and the UK. If necessary, you can keep the same IP for 30 minutes.
Decodo’s shared proxies bring even more locations, namely Australia and Israel. They come in a list by default, but you also get an endpoint that automatically rotates the proxies for you. It’s possible to choose where exactly you want the IPs to be located when buying a plan. (For instance, 56 proxies in the US, 32 in Australia, and the remaining 12 in Germany.)
Pricing Plans
All three options use a subscription-based pricing model that automatically renews every month. The rotating proxies charge for traffic use, dedicated proxies – IPs, while the shared proxies combine both formats.
Decodo offers a broad range of pricing plans. Their entry threshold is small, but the plans scale to thousands of IPs and terabytes of traffic. Naturally, the more you buy, the cheaper it gets.
If your rotating plan outgrows its traffic allowance, Decodo provides an option to top up without moving on to the next tier. There’s one gotcha: the price for a gigabyte always remains at its most expensive rate of $0.7. All shared plans start with 50 GBs of traffic, but it’s very cheap to get more: a gigabyte literally costs fractions of a cent.
In a broader context, Decodo’s prices look good. It charges less than most premium competitors until enterprise levels of scale, no matter which option you consider.
Performance Benchmarks
#1: Infrastructure performance (rotating proxies)
- Requests: 50,000
- Proxy location: US
- Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
- Our computer’s location: US
#2: Download speed
- IPs tested: 10
- Target: Hetzner’s 100MB Ashburn benchmark
#3: Performance with popular targets
- Requests: ~2,600 per target
- Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper
- Proxy location: US
- Our server location: US
Decodo Web Scraping APIs
Proxy networks aside, Decodo offers four web scraping APIs. You can pass them an URL, and the APIs will return its contents without fail. You won’t have to worry about managing proxy networks or overcoming website protection mechanisms.
Web Scraping API is Decodo’s general-purpose scraper – it can extract any page without structuring the output. The other three have parsers for specific website groups, namely search engines, e-commerce stores, and social media networks.
Features
- Targets: Universal
- Structured data: Google, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit
- Locations: All countries (+ coordinates for Google, ZIP code for Amazon)
- Headless browsers: JavaScript rendering, browser instructions, screenshots
- Concurrency: Unlimited
- Integration: Real-time API, async API (with batch requests), proxy API
- Output formats: HTML, JSON (for targets with parsers)
- Other features: Device type, custom headers, sessions
Decodo’s scrapers are rich with features. You can select any country, specify a device type, add custom headers, and pass on cookies with a session ID for multi-step scraping.
The general-purpose API accepts any URL you send it. Decodo’s specialized APIs use a parametrized request structure, meaning you can simply enter a search query, ASIN, or hashtag without forming URLs yourself. They also have target-specific parameters like domain language or co-ordinates for localized Google results.
In addition, Decodo has built specialized scrapers for various properties of major targets. For example, there’s an endpoint optimized for Google ads, Amazon product pages, or TikTok hashtags.
All three tools integrate as an API or proxy server. The first method works over an open connection, or you can fetch results via webhook with an option to send batch requests.
Pricing Plans
- Model: Subscription
- Format: Successful requests
- Starting price
- General-purpose & social media: $50 for 25k requests ($2 CPM)
- SERP & E-Commerce: $30 for 15k requests ($2 CPM)
- Trial: 1k requests over 7 days
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Decodo’s APIs in January 2023, for our research on web scraping APIs.
Test #1: Google (10,800 requests over 7 days)
Decodo’s SERP scraper performed flawlessly with Google: it returned nearly all of our requests, and enabling data parsing had no effect on the response time.
Test #2: Amazon (1,000 requests)
Amazon posed no challenge as well. The scraper was even faster compared to Google, despite Amazon having much bigger page sizes.
Test #3: Photo-focused social media network (500 requests to each)
The results with social media were also perfect. One weak spot was response time with JavaScript rendering enabled – it slowed down the scraper significantly.
How to Use Decodo
Registration
To register with Decodo, you’ll need to enter an email and password, select a use case from a provided list, and then verify your email address. Alternatively, you can sign up with your Google account.
Decodo does have a KYC procedure, but you only need to interact with someone if you trigger the provider’s safeguards. It’s possible to access the dashboard without verifying an email address, but you won’t be able to buy anything until you do.
Dashboard
Decodo’s dashboard includes all the necessary functionality to manage proxies yourself. You can:
- add money to the Decodo wallet,
- buy and upgrade plans,
- authorize access to proxies,
- set up the proxy server,
- create sub-users,
- track your traffic use,
- and contact customer support.
Most of the controls are separated by service. There are sections for datacenter, residential proxies, and web scraping tools which lead to individual products. For example, to reach mobile proxies, I’d need to click on the Residential proxies drop-down and select them from the available options.
You can get a quick overview of your services on the dashboard’s main screen: see your current plan, top targets, and traffic use. However, it’s once again dedicated to one product at a time, requiring you to open different tabs for other services.
There are introductory tutorials and guidance all around to help you get acquainted. However, they don’t feel overbearing.
Subscription Management
Decodo supports full self-service for each product. You can buy a plan in two ways. The first is by making a direct purchase with your credit card, PayPal, or another payment method. Alternatively, you can add money to the Decodo wallet first and then use it for purchases. This lets you pay as you go.
Before purchasing a plan, you can use Decodo’s Smart Plan Recommendation tool. It requires completing three steps: entering a target, selecting headless or non-headless scraping, and usage frequency. The dashboard then recommends a suitable plan. This tool is available for the residential proxies and scraping APIs.
Decodo has a separate Billing section where you can see payment history, download invoices, overview and modify all active plans. It’s also the place to top up your wallet balance.
Proxy Management
The proxy setup is pretty straightforward:
- Create a user or whitelist an IP address.
- Use a convenient widget to filter the proxy servers you need. The widget asks you to choose your preferred authentication method, set up the filtering options (location, OS), rotation time, protocol, and output format (endpoint:port or cURL formatted).
- Select how many endpoints you want to generate. Or, in the case of dedicated proxies, select your assigned IPs. Once you’re done, you can copy this list to the clipboard, export it into .csv or .txt.
Decodo also automatically generates code samples in cURL and multiple programming languages. You can copy-paste this into your web scraping script.
Overall, the setup procedure is well thought out. My only gripe is that you can’t set a custom password for a proxy user. The system generates them automatically.
In addition, Decodo offers a fleshed-out API for controlling its proxies programmatically. The API is available for every user, not only resellers. Its functions include creating and managing sub-users, setting traffic limits, viewing usage reports and subscription status, and filtering available endpoints.
If you need proxies on your web browser, Decodo provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. In the settings, you can choose a country, whether you want the proxies to be sticky or rotate, and authorize them either with a whitelisted IP or user:pass credentials.
Usage Tracking
Decodo’s dashboard includes visual graphs where you can see how much traffic or requests you’ve expended. You can filter the graphs by sub-user or date, and they also display statistics for each target. The timeframes are 24 hours, week, month, or custom.
Alternatively, you can fetch traffic expenditure statistics using an API call.
Documentation
Decodo has got the documentation part down. You’ll find a plethora of instructions covering various aspects of the service:
- a detailed start guide that explains all the concepts and features,
- an FAQ divided into multiple sections by topics,
- integration guides for major bots and automation tools,
- and configuration guides for web browsers and operating systems.
There’s also a separate hub for technical documentation with tips & tricks, code samples, and troubleshooting. Some of the content has become outdated, but the documentation is handled well in general.
For users of its scraping APIs, Decodo has an interactive playground to try out the service.
Hands-On Support
Decodo’s customer service is available round the clock via email or live chat. The main language is English, though the support can also speak Chinese – and, of course, other languages via Google Translate.
Whenever we’ve had to interact with the support agents, we received quick (think nearly instant) and competent responses. In 2020, we even gave Decodo an award to acknowledge its customer service. It remains excellent to this day and can be considered one of the provider’s strongest points.
Conclusion
Having read this far, I hope you can see where I was coming from in the introduction.
Decodo really has struck something great. The company has responsive customer support, performant proxies, and everything set up for convenient self-service.
To be fair, compared to something like Bright Data or Oxylabs, it’s nothing special. But this is without considering Decodo’s final ace – it somehow manages to achieve all this while keeping prices very competitive.
Of course, not everything is perfect. Some corners had to be cut, and you may find services like Decodo’s dedicated proxies – or in some cases, its web scraping APIs – limited.
But that’s the whole point of Decodo: the company focuses on the functionality that is good enough for the majority of users at the expense of some nice-to-have or niche features. And it is damn good at that.
Based on my experience with Decodo, I can recommend it to anyone looking for a great proxy provider.
Decodo Alternatives
Oxylabs is like a premium version of Decodo. It controls a significantly larger IP pool, and you can get specialized APIs that simplify web scraping.
Bright Data is another strong option with more features and powerful proxy management tools. It also sells proxy-based web scraping APIs and complete data sets.
SOAX offers similar features and performance to Decodo. The proxy pool may be smaller and less diverse, but it comes at a slightly lower price point.
Want more? View the full list of the Decodo alternatives.
Recommended for:
Anyone looking for a great balance between features and price.
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