Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) proxy service review

A proxy service acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet, enabling you to bypass IP blocks, geo-restrictions, CAPTCHAs, and other location-based obstacles people encounter online. It also enhances your browsing security by creating a degree of separation between your device and the websites you visit.

Many proxy services exist, including murky ones you should avoid. TechRadar conducted extensive research and testing to select the best proxy services, and Decodo scored highly. This proxy service has been around since 2018, offering over 115 million IPs across 195 locations with excellent uptime and speed. It provides residential, data center, and mobile proxies to boost your browsing security. It also offers a Site Unblocker feature that lets you bypass CAPTCHAs and visit restricted sites.

Likewise, Decodo offers scraping APIs that let users automate the process of extracting publicly available data from websites. We tested this platform and its features to provide a detailed review. After reading our review, deciding whether Decodo is worth adopting should be easy.

Plans and pricing

Decodo doesn’t have a subscription pricing model like many proxy providers. Instead, its pricing is based on how many IPs you require, the type of IPs, and the volume of data you consume. The pricing structure is complex, but let’s break it down below.

Decodo promotes its Residential IPs starting from $2.2 monthly per GB, but there’s a trick. This price is only available to those who use at least 5,000 GB monthly, which excludes individuals and small businesses. The pay-as-you-go price for regular users actually starts from $7 per GB. The higher the Gigabytes you consume, the lower the unit price for each gigabyte, e.g., $245 monthly for 50 GB ($4.9 per GB), $450 monthly for 100 GB ($4.5 per GB), and $11,000 monthly for 5,000 GB ($2.2 per GB).

Static residential proxies start from $0.42 monthly per IP. For example, 500 IPs cost $210 monthly ($0.42 per IP), but 25 IPs cost $12.5 ($0.5 monthly). The greater the number of IPs, the lower the unit cost of each IP.

Pay-as-you-go mobile proxies cost $8 monthly per GB for regular users. However, if you choose a set number of GB beforehand (e.g., 50 GB and 100 GB), the per GB price is discounted below $8 monthly.

Datacenter proxies start from $0.60 monthly per IP pay-as-you-go and reduce depending on the number of chosen IPs. The Site Unblocker starts from $14 per GB.

Decodo runs a pricing model that favors bulk users over individual and small business users. If you run a large organization that needs many IPs and Gigabytes, you’ll find Decodo cost-effective because of the significant discounts. However, Decodo is expensive for small users.

You can utilize the 3-day free trial, admittedly short, to test Decodo before making a final decision. If unsatisfied after payment, you have a 14-day window to request a refund.

Features

A Decodo user's journey begins with registration—you can sign up with an email address or link a Google account. Your account dashboard conveniently has all features located on the left, which you can easily sift through. Whether you need residential proxies, ISP proxies, or scraping, you can choose it on the left menu.

After choosing and paying for a plan, you can conveniently add users via your dashboard. As the administrator, Decodo gives complete control over the IP resources you’ll allocate to each sub-user. For example, you can give a user 1 GB of data and another 10 GB. Each user from your organization has unique credentials to access Decodo.

You can create and customize proxy connections from your dashboard. First, you'll choose a sticky or rotating proxy. Sticky proxies change at set intervals (up to 24 hours) while rotating proxies change with every connection request. Then, you can choose an IP from a specific country/city or a random one as your proxy. With these options set, you can start utilizing Decodo’s online protection.

Let’s dive deeper into the features of this app:

Residential proxies

Residential proxies are real IPs from residential devices across the globe. Decodo promotes its service as “ethically sourced” proxies, which is crucial because some proxy services use IP addresses acquired without the owners' knowledge. Instead, Decodo gives access to residential IPs acquired with consent. You can choose from over 195 locations, with the United States, Germany, the UK, India, and Canada having the highest number of available proxies.

Residential proxies enable you to bypass geo-restrictions, e.g., changing your location to watch a sports match on a streaming site. During our test, we found Decodo's residential IPs to have excellent uptime and speed.

Mobile proxies

Decodo gives you access to mobile IP addresses around the globe. Its 10 million+ IP pool covers 160+ locations, and you can choose from 700+ mobile carriers. The largest pool of Smartpoxy's mobile IPs is available in the United States (3.9 million), Germany (1.2 million), the UK (940,000), and India (720,000).

Proxy mobile IPs help you bypass content geo-restrictions. They're also helpful for app testing, wherein developers test their apps across different devices, operating systems, and locations to ensure optimal user experience. Likewise, mobile IPs are useful for website scraping.

Proxy server (Data center IP)

You have access to residential and mobile IPs. But how about renting an entire proxy server for your online activities? Decodo offers this service, which helps bypass hard geo-restrictions and web scraping obstacles. You can choose a shared or dedicated proxy server; the latter costs more.

Decodo offers shared servers across many locations, but dedicated proxy servers are available only in the US. You can connect to the proxy servers via the HTTP(S) or SOCKS5 protocol.

Site Unblocker

Site Unblocker is a proxy-like solution that Decodo provides. It allows you to bypass IP and geographical restrictions and extract data from websites with robust CAPTCHAs and anti-bot measures.

Decodo's Site Unblocker differentiates itself from typical proxies with unique abilities like browser fingerprinting, which creates a different browser fingerprint for each proxy to bypass anti-bot measures; and JavaScript rendering, letting you execute website JavaScript codes without a headless browser. Of course, there’s automatic proxy rotation to prevent websites from identifying and blocking your IP address.

Scraping

A common use case for proxies is scraping public data from websites. But why stop there if you can go further? Decodo offers APIs that let you automate website scraping instead of doing it manually for each website. It offers four types of scraping APIs: web, social media, e-commerce, and SERP.

The web scraping API lets you retrieve large amounts of data from any website. The results will be presented in an HTML or tabular format, and you can schedule scrapes beforehand. Many websites police IP addresses and use CAPTCHAs to discourage scraping, but Decodo offers a full-stack solution to bypass these obstacles and scrape public data.

Social media scraping involves gathering structured social media data at scale, with results presented in HTML or JSON format. For example, you can track the engagement rates of influencers working with your brand, monitor your competitors' follower growth, or discover trending content to latch onto it quickly. You can make synchronous or asynchronous scraping requests: the former gives real-time data, and the latter gives you data at a specific time.

The eCommerce scraper lets you get structured marketing and pricing data from online stores, with the results presented in HTML, JSON, or table format. This API is helpful for businesses that run price comparison sites, enabling you to scrape real-time pricing data to help people find the best deals. Decodo lets you schedule scraping tasks in advance, and you'll be notified via email once they're completed.

SERP means search engine results page. Decodo's SERP scraping API lets you access structured data from search engine pages, with the results presented in HTML, JSON, or table format. With this scraper, you can research your competitors’ search rankings, URLs, and meta descriptions directly from Google queries.

Your scraping charges depend on how many requests you make. Expect to pay between $0.8 and $2 per 1,000 API requests.

X Browser

Decodo takes anti-online detection one step further by offering a whole private browser. The X Browser is designed with a privacy focus, allowing you to juggle multiple browser profiles, each with a unique fingerprint. This way, websites can't link these profiles to another on your device and discover your identity. The X Browser helps you juggle multiple accounts on a single website without being limited by geo-restrictions.

Ease of Use

Decodo has an excellent user interface that is easy to navigate. On the desktop interface, all features are arranged on the left side, and you can click anyone to access your desired feature. With a white background, black text, and colorful buttons, Decodo’s interface looks pleasing to the eye.

Along with the website interface, Decodo offers browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox. These extensions give you access to features like one-click IP rotation, customizable session length, and seamless switching between proxies. Like the main Decodo interface, the extensions are easy to navigate.

Decodo makes it easy to integrate its proxies with various third-party tools, such as e-commerce purchase bots, scraping software, SEO tools, and external proxy managers like MuLogin and AdsPower. The backend has been taken care of, so you just need a few steps to kickstart the integration from your intuitive dashboard.

Customer Support

Excellent customer support is one of Decodo’s strengths. This support begins with extensive technical documentation for its features. You can find tutorials and user guides concerning all features, with detailed screenshots illustrating the instructions. You can learn everything about the app in the Help Center, from a basic introduction until you reach more complex aspects.

Decodo has a YouTube channel with video tutorials about its features. This channel allows users to learn about the platform more interactively and has dozens of illustrative and engaging videos.

Of course, customer support can’t be left to the customer alone. If you need help, Smarproxy's support team is available via live chat. You can contact the support team 24/7 and get speedy answers, although the response time varies depending on your time zone. You can also reach Decodo’s support team via email (for non-urgent inquiries) and expect a response within 24 to 48 hours.

Other complementary support resources include Decodo’s GitHub repository with code samples and a Discord channel where you can connect with other users and share solutions to common issues. Decodo also holds frequent webinars to help users learn the ins and outs of this platform and general trends in the proxy software market.

The Competition

There’s no shortage of competition in the proxy software sector. Decodo has robust competitors like IPRoyal, OxyLabs, and WebShare. It outshines many competitors by providing a broader range of global IP addresses and complementary features like the X Browser and scraping APIs. However, our main issue is with Decodo’s pricing– it’s significantly more expensive than many rivals, especially for low-volume users.

If you’re a bulk user needing hundreds of proxy IPs, Decodo is an ideal tool. However, it’s too costly for individuals or small enterprises needing a few dozen IPs at most.

Final verdict

Decodo is one of the best proxy tools we’ve reviewed. Its speed, uptime, and reliability are unmatched. It provides a wide range of IPs and has complementary features to help you scrape websites and counter anti-bot measures. However, this tool is primarily meant for large enterprises with many users. Small enterprises or individuals will likely find it too expensive.

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