Decodo Review 2025: The Best Proxy Server for Smaller Businesses
SOURCE:CNET|BY:Joe Supan
Decodo’s residential proxy servers aren’t the cheapest, but it has one of the largest and most high-quality pools around, and it was one of the most user-friendly proxies I tested.
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) is one of the most well-established players in the proxy server space, and it’s easy to see why. It gives you stable and fast performance, a vast and high-quality pool of proxies and plenty of features to help you reach your goals.
I’d recommend Decodo to anyone thinking about using a proxy server, but with its low pay-as-you-go prices and beginner-friendly tools, it’s especially attractive for smaller businesses and new users. (Enterprise customers will be better off with Oxylabs; you can read our review here.) It has the lowest pay-as-you-go price of any residential proxy server out there, starting at $3.50 per GB, though bulk data packages are more expensive than most competitors. Decodo’s pricing on mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies were also competitive -- just not the very cheapest out there.
As someone who was new to proxy servers when I started reviewing them, I also appreciated Decodo’s usability features. It’s one of the few proxies I tested that has a browser extension -- helpful for checking your data usage at a glance or adding websites to a bypass list to exclude from your proxy server. And when I did run into issues, Decodo’s AI chatbot was actually pretty helpful. I primarily focused on Decodo’s residential proxy servers for this review, but I’ll also get into its mobile, ISP and datacenter services below.
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Cost
Decodo received a middling score for value in our proxy server evaluation. It’s tied with Webshare and Rayobyte for the cheapest pay-as-you-go plan of any proxy I saw, but all of its bulk data packages are on the expensive side. Here’s how the price breaks down across its residential and mobile proxy server plans:
Plan
Residential (per GB)
Mobile (per GB)
Pay As You Go
$3.50
$4.00
2GB
$6.00
$3.75
8GB
$5.50
$3.50
25GB
$5.20
$3.25
50GB
$4.90
$3.00
100GB
$4.50
$2.75
250GB
$4.00
$2.50
500GB
$3.50
$2.25
1000GB
$3.00
Custom
Unlike most residential proxies, the price actually goes up when you buy in bulk compared to one gigabyte at a time. This makes it an especially attractive option for someone who wants to, say, use a sneaker bot to purchase limited-edition shoes without being detected. Instead of overpaying for 500GB of data to get the $3.50-per-GB price, you can just add more whenever you see a pair you like.
The downside to that is it could get really annoying to constantly add one gig at a time to your account, especially if you’re doing things like bulk web scraping or SEO tracking. Still, Decodo’s prices for its 25-250GB plan are competitive, even if you’ll pay more than you would by the gig. The table below shows how Decodo compares to some of the other popular residential proxy servers. Keep in mind, different proxy servers offer different data packages, so it’s not always a precisely apples-to-apples comparison.
Plan
Decodo (per GB)
Oxylabs (per GB)
Webshare (per GB)
Infatica (per GB)
Pay As You Go
$3.50
$4.00
$3.50
$4.00
25GB
$5.20
$3.87 (13GB)
$2.60
$3.84
50GB
$4.90
$3.75 (40GB)
$2.45
None
100GB
$4.50
$3.49 (86GB)
$2.25
$3.60
250GB
$4.00
$2.75 (318GB)
$2.00
$2.90 (241GB)
500GB
$3.50
None
$1.75
$2.70
1000GB
$3.00
$2.00
$1.50
$2.60
When it comes to ISP and datacenter proxy servers, Decodo’s plans are more competitively priced. Most proxies charge by the IP address for these plans instead of by data usage. Decodo’s datacenter proxy prices start at $1.35 per dedicated IP for a package of 200 and go up to $1.85 for three.
Performance
To evaluate Decodo’s performance, I relied heavily on Proxyway’s 2025 Research report, which annually sends out over a million requests to top proxy servers to measure things like success rate, response time and IP quality. I also signed up for Decodo’s residential proxy service myself and connected to it while I worked for two days to see how it performed under real-world conditions.
Overall, Decodo received my highest performance score of any proxy server. It has a rare combination of always-on success rate and ultra-low response time, and it lets you choose from more than 195 locations for your proxy server. In the US, you can even pick specific ZIP codes that you want your traffic to route through.
Proxy pool and quality
Decodo advertises 115 million proxy servers in its pool, which is behind only Oxylabs (175 million), SOAX (155 million) and Bright Data (150 million). This large number of proxies is essential to avoid anti-bot detection for activities like web scraping. But the raw number isn’t the only thing that matters -- you also need those IPs to be high-quality.
Decodo offers more than 195 locations to choose from in its proxy pool.
Decodo
Proxyway uses an industry standard called IPQualityScore (IPQS), which is commonly used in fraud prevention, risk analysis and threat detection. This tells you not just how many servers a proxy company has at its disposal, but also how many of those IP addresses are likely to be flagged as fraudulent.
By this measure, Decodo ranked second globally and first in the US for IPv4 addresses. Some proxy services have a larger share of IPv6 addresses, of which there are exponentially more than IPv4. But only about 40% of top websites currently support IPv6, so you’re more likely to run into compatibility issues with proxies that rely heavily on the newer standard. Decodo’s pool only consists of 16.6% IPv6 addresses.
According to Proxyway’s report, fraud scores over 90% are likely to be flagged as “high-risk users likely to engage in malicious behavior.” Decodo still has a global pool made up of mostly 90+ IPQS scores, but that’s par for the course with proxy services. It is still in the top three globally for IP quality (meaning it has one of the lowest proportions of high-risk users), and number one for the US specifically.
Proxyway’s fraud score analysis found that Decodo had the second-highest percentage of addresses below 75% in its global pool.
Proxyway Proxy Market Research 2025
Success rate and response time
Decodo’s proxy servers are able to complete its tasks a vast majority of the time, and they do it faster than any other company. According to the Proxyway report, Decodo had an infrastructure success rate of 99.86%, which was just narrowly behind Oxylabs at 99.90%. Whether you’re using a proxy server for web scraping, buying limited edition items or data aggregation, you can be certain that Decodo will carry out your tasks successfully almost every time (basically 999 out of 1,000).
It also does them as quickly as you can expect from a proxy server. Decodo has an average response time of 0.63 seconds -- less than one-third the delay of last place Rayobyte.
That’s still about 50 times slower than the average internet connection in the US without a proxy, but again, all things are relative with proxy services, and it’s highly unlikely anyone will be using a proxy for things that require low latency like videoconferencing or online gaming. (For these activities, a VPN is a much better option, though it comes with its own caveats. You can learn more about the difference between the two in our guide.)
Decodo had the lowest average response times in its residential global pool of any popular proxy service.
Proxyway Proxy Market Research 2025
Features and usability
Decodo comes with all of the customization options we looked for in a proxy service, and then some.
By default, Decodo’s proxies rotate with every connection request, which means you’re constantly getting a new IP address every time you want to carry out a task. But you can also choose to establish a “sticky” connection for any time period you choose, up to 24 hours. That was a greater level of customization than almost any other proxy service I tested.
Decodo allows for both rotating and sticky sessions, with durations up to 24 hours available.
Decodo
Decodo also doesn’t limit the number of requests you can make simultaneously, allowing you to keep as many going as your hardware is able to perform. It also supports all the major protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5.
There were a few extra features I really appreciated as well. Decodo’s Site Unblocker lets users extract data from websites without building their own custom web scraping application. It was also one of the few proxy services that has a browser extension that allows you to track your usage, add websites to a bypass list or turn the proxy on or off.
Decodo’s helpful browser extension works with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Decodo
I generally found Decodo to be the most user-friendly proxy service of any of the dozen I tested. Most proxies require a decent amount of technical know-how to set up, but Decodo minimized the learning curve with its vast trove of documentation and user guides. And when questions inevitably popped up, Decodo’s chat feature was actually effective in answering them -- or at least guiding me toward the appropriate troubleshooting page.
It was also easier to check simple analytics about my usage than most other proxies. Its main dashboard showed how much data I’d used at any given time, and it even translated that into how much of my budget that worked out to. All of that was easy to access through Decodo’s browser extension, too. If I was managing a larger project, I could see how those little touches could be a godsend, and I found myself missing them on other proxies I tested.
Decodo’s proxy networks
I’ve focused on Decodo’s residential proxy servers for this review, as those are the most common types for most use cases, but the company offers the full suite of servers, including mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies. Here’s what you can expect from each type of Decodo proxy server.
Mobile
Decodo has mobile proxies in most countries around the world, with an advertised pool of 10 million IP addresses -- good for the third-largest of any proxy service. Like its residential proxy pool, you can target IPs by country, state, city, ASN (Autonomous System Number) or even a device’s operating system.
It also had the highest infrastructure success rate of any mobile proxy at 99.94% and the fastest response time at 0.57 seconds, according to Proxyway’s Market Research report. Decodo’s mobile proxy server prices are also some of the lowest I saw, and significantly below its residential plans.
Plan
Decodo (per GB)
Oxylabs (per GB)
Infatica (per GB)
Pay As You Go
$4.00
$5.40
$8.00
25GB
$3.25
$4.92 (12GB)
$6.50 (20GB)
50GB
$3.00
$4.74 (38GB)
$6.00 (40GB)
100GB
$2.75
$4.50 (80GB)
$5.00
250GB
$2.50
$3.60 (292GB)
$4.00 (200GB)
500GB
$2.25
$3.00 (600GB)
Custom
Datacenter
Datacenter proxies tend to be the cheapest type you can find, and that holds true for Decodo’s, with prices starting at just $3.50 for 50GB and 100 shared IPs. Most datacenter proxies charge by the IP rather than the GB, but Decodo offers both, along with the ability to pay per dedicated IP.
Decodo says its datacenter proxy pool consists of more than 100,000 shared and dedicated datacenter servers. Its dedicated datacenter proxies are all located in the US, while its shared pool consists of 16 countries. The major downside to Decodo’s datacenter proxies is that you can only target entire countries, not specific cities.
ISP (static residential)
Decodo’s ISP, or static residential, proxy servers have a similar pricing structure to its datacenter proxies. You can pay by the GB, by the dedicated IP or by the shared IP and the GB. In Proxyway’s testing, it sent 70,000 requests over a week and found that Decodo’s datacenter proxies were identified as residential 57%, which it described as an “OK result.” You get what you pay for with ISP proxies, though -- the higher percentage of traffic that’s flagged is offset by the lower costs per GB.
The bottom line
A great proxy service comes down to its cost per GB, the size and quality of its proxy pool, its success rate and response time and user experience. On almost all of those fronts, Decodo performed incredibly well.
There are a couple services out there with larger proxy pools, but none that could match the quality of Decodo’s residential IPs or its overall performance. Combined with its best-in-class documentation and usability tools, Decodo is an easy pick for the best proxy for individual users.
My only bone to pick is the price. If you’re going to be paying for 1TB or more at a time for a residential proxy service, you could potentially save thousands of dollars a month by going with Oxylabs or Webshare, although both come with their own drawbacks like slower response time, lower IP quality and a worse user experience.
