Smartproxy built its reputation as a mid-market proxy network that gave serious scrapers access to a large residential IP pool without the enterprise price tag or the enterprise sales calls. This review looks at where it stands in 2026, what its proxies and tools actually do, how the pricing model works, and where it falls short for web scraping.
Name change: In 2025, Smartproxy rebranded as Decodo. The product, dashboard and infrastructure carried over; only the brand changed. If you land on decodo.com looking for "Smartproxy," you are in the right place. We use "Smartproxy" below for continuity, but treat the two as the same service.
Smartproxy at a glance
Smartproxy positions itself between budget proxy sellers and the top-tier enterprise networks. The core offering has expanded well beyond a single residential pool into a full proxy-and-scraping toolkit:
- Residential proxies — a large pool (well over 100 million IPs) sourced from real devices across virtually every country, with country, city and ASN targeting.
- Datacenter proxies — a cheaper, faster pool for targets that do not aggressively fingerprint IP origin.
- ISP (static residential) proxies — residential IPs hosted in datacenters, combining a residential "look" with datacenter speed and the ability to keep the same IP for long sessions.
- Mobile proxies — 4G/5G IPs for the hardest mobile-first targets.
- Scraping APIs — managed endpoints (SERP, e-commerce/product, social, and general web) that handle rendering, retries and unblocking for you and return parsed data.
- No-code and helper tools — a browser extension, an anti-detect browser, and dashboard-based scraper templates.
For most scraping work, the residential and ISP pools are the interesting part; datacenter proxies are a cost-saver for friendlier targets.
Key features
- Rotating and sticky sessions — rotate the IP on every request, or hold one for a sticky session (historically up to around 30 minutes) when you need to keep a login or a cart alive.
- Flexible targeting — country everywhere, plus city- and ASN-level targeting in supported locations, which matters for localized pricing, SERP and availability data.
- Unlimited concurrent connections on residential plans — you are billed on traffic, not on the number of threads, so you can scale concurrency freely.
- Multiple auth methods — username/password or IP whitelisting, useful when your tooling cannot pass credentials.
- HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 — SOCKS5 support has been added since the older reviews that listed its absence as a drawback.
- Sub-users and usage tracking — split traffic across projects with per-user limits.
- API-first control — everything the dashboard does can be driven programmatically.
The dashboard and setup
Onboarding is genuinely quick. After registration you get a dashboard whose landing page is a usage chart (traffic, requests, sub-user stats). Setting up an endpoint is a matter of choosing a location and a session type from dropdowns and copying the generated proxy string into your scraper. Whitelisting IPs, creating sub-users and generating endpoints are all a couple of clicks. This is where Smartproxy has always scored well: the learning curve is shallow compared with older, list-based proxy providers.
Support is available around the clock via live chat and email, and has a reputation for actually helping with integration questions rather than reading from a script.
Smartproxy pricing: how the model works
Smartproxy sells proxies primarily on a pay-per-gigabyte basis, with the effective per-GB rate dropping as you commit to larger monthly volumes. There is typically:
- A subscription model with monthly traffic tiers (the more GB you commit to, the lower the price per GB).
- A pay-as-you-go option for lighter or spiky usage, at a higher per-GB rate.
- Separate, cheaper pricing for datacenter proxies, often sold per-IP or per-GB depending on the sub-product.
- A money-back / trial window so you can test before committing (historically a few days, with a cap on how much traffic you can burn before requesting a refund).
Exact figures move around with promotions and plan reshuffles, so check the current rate card rather than trusting any number quoted in an old review — including this one. The important structural points are stable: residential is billed by bandwidth, datacenter is cheaper, and unit costs fall with volume. Budget by estimating how many GB your crawl will actually pull (HTML is light; loading full pages with images in a headless browser is not), because bandwidth — not thread count — is what you pay for.
If you are weighing providers, our broader guide to choosing residential proxies covers how to compare pools, pricing units and targeting across vendors.
Performance and suitability for scraping
In practice, the residential pool performs the way you would expect from a large, well-maintained network: low block rates on mainstream targets, reliable rotation, and good geographic coverage for localized data. Because each residential IP is a real device with genuine ISP information, requests blend in far better than raw datacenter traffic on sites that score IP reputation.
Realistic expectations, rather than fabricated benchmarks:
- Residential is the right choice for aggressively protected targets — search engines, large marketplaces, sneaker and ticketing sites, social platforms — where datacenter IPs get blocked on sight.
- Datacenter is faster and cheaper and perfectly fine for smaller sites, internal tools and APIs that do not fingerprint origin.
- ISP/static proxies are the sweet spot when you need residential legitimacy and a stable IP for long sessions or account-based scraping.
Proxies alone do not defeat modern defenses. You will still need sensible request pacing, realistic headers, and often a headless browser plus CAPTCHA handling to get through. Rotation is one layer in a wider anti-blocking strategy; if you route every request through a fresh IP but keep an obviously robotic fingerprint, you will still get flagged. See our guide to rotating proxies for scraping for how to wire this into a crawler.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Large, high-quality residential pool with broad geographic and city/ASN targeting
- Easy dashboard and fast setup — friendly to newcomers
- Traffic-based billing with unlimited concurrency on residential
- Multiple product tiers (residential, ISP, datacenter, mobile) under one account
- Managed scraping APIs for teams that want data, not proxy plumbing
- Responsive 24/7 support and a money-back window
Cons
- Bandwidth-based pricing can get expensive for heavy, image-loading crawls
- City/ASN targeting is limited to supported locations — niche geos may not be granular
- Premium residential is priced above budget providers (you are paying for pool quality)
- As with any provider, the largest enterprise networks may still edge it out on the very hardest targets
The verdict
Smartproxy (now Decodo) remains a strong, practical choice for web scraping: a quality residential pool, a genuinely usable dashboard, flexible traffic-based pricing, and an expanding set of scraping APIs for teams that would rather not manage proxies at all. It is not the absolute cheapest, and heavy headless crawls will feel the per-GB cost, but for most projects it hits a sensible balance of quality, price and ease of use.
If proxies, rotation and unblocking are turning into a project of their own, that is often a sign to hand the collection layer off entirely. Scraping.Pro runs the full pipeline as a service — proxies, headless rendering, CAPTCHA solving and parsing included — and delivers clean, structured data so you never have to tune a proxy plan again.
This review reflects the service's general capabilities and pricing model; specific plans, limits and prices change frequently, so confirm current details on the provider's site before buying.