Bright Data Alternatives: Oxylabs, Decodo, IPRoyal, Node4
Bright Data's KYC step, plan sizes and fair-use terms, and four providers that answer them, compared on billing unit, term, targeting and sessions.
If you use Bright Data only for proxies, the replacement depends on why you are leaving. For the same two layers, proxies plus a scraping API, compare Oxylabs. For a small residential purchase without a monthly plan, compare Decodo pay as you go or IPRoyal, whose residential traffic does not expire. For a small monthly residential allowance, or datacenter IPs without a per-IP fair-use allowance in the United States, Italy or Spain, compare Node4. If your code also calls Bright Data's unblocking or browser products, compare those tools first; a proxy swap will not replace them.
Competitor facts are linked to the vendor's own page and were checked October 5, 2026; the Oxylabs Web Scraper API terms were rechecked October 26, 2026. Nothing here measured speed or success rates.
Why teams look past Bright Data
- Residential access starts with a compliance review. Bright Data's pricing page describes a short KYC compliance process before you use the residential or mobile network. Teams that want residential traffic the same afternoon have to plan for that step.
- Monthly residential plans are sized for steady volume. Bright Data lists $499 a month for 141 GB with the coupon shown on the page, and $4.00 a GB pay as you go with no commitment, with the coupon shown on the page (50% off with coupon RESIGB50; the undiscounted rate shown is $8 a GB). Both are coupon prices, so check whether the coupon still applies when you buy.
- Datacenter IPs carry an allowance. The datacenter page states a 100 GB fair usage allowance per datacenter IP per month.
- Large orders go to sales, with a sales quote above 1 TB of residential traffic or 1,000 datacenter IPs.
Bright Data also publishes terms a buyer may want to keep: datacenter proxies in 98 locations, shared or dedicated, billed per IP or per GB, and residential IPs from 195 countries with city, state, ZIP code and ASN targeting at no extra cost.
The shortlist compared
| Provider and product | Billed by | Smallest purchase | Term | Targeting | Protocols | Sticky sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data residential | GB | $4.00 a GB pay as you go with no commitment, with the coupon shown on the page; monthly from $499 a month for 141 GB with the coupon shown on the page | Pay as you go or monthly | City, state, ZIP, ASN | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | Sticky and rotating; maximum not stated on the pricing page |
| Oxylabs residential | GB | $30 a month for 5 GB | Monthly | 195 or more countries, filtered by country, state, city, continent, ZIP, coordinates and ASN | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | the same IP for up to 24 hours |
| Decodo residential | GB | $4 a GB pay as you go, from 1 GB, with no monthly commitment; or $11.25 a month for 3 GB | Pay as you go or monthly | continent, country, state, city, ZIP code and ASN targeting | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | sticky sessions of up to 24 hours |
| IPRoyal residential | GB | $7.00 a GB on a 1 GB subscription, or $7.35 a GB pay as you go | residential traffic that never expires | Country, state, city | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | sticky sessions from 1 second up to 7 days |
| Node4 residential | GB | 3 GB, $4.99 a month | Monthly allowance | 170+ countries; country, state, city, ASN | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | Best effort, up to 30 min |
| Node4 dedicated datacenter | Proxy, per month | 5 proxies, $7.45 a month | Monthly | United States, Italy, Spain | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | Static IPs |
A light residential month, with numbers
For example, suppose a team needs about 10 GB of residential traffic a month, from US cities, with no long sessions.
- Bright Data: $4.00 a GB pay as you go with no commitment, with the coupon shown on the page, so ten times that rate. The smallest monthly plan is far larger than the job.
- Decodo: $4 a GB pay as you go, from 1 GB, with no monthly commitment, again ten times the rate. Its larger monthly plans were not recorded here, so check whether one undercuts that.
- IPRoyal: a 1 GB purchase is $7.00 a GB on a 1 GB subscription, or $7.35 a GB pay as you go, with lower rates on bigger purchases; whatever you do not use stays available.
- Oxylabs: the Starter plan is $30 a month for 5 GB, so 10 GB means a larger plan or top-ups; see its page.
- Node4: the 10 GB tier is $9.99 a month, a monthly allowance that does not carry over.
On those published figures Node4's 10 GB allowance costs less than ten GB at Bright Data's or Decodo's pay-as-you-go rate; IPRoyal's and Oxylabs' totals at 10 GB were not recorded here. Meanwhile IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic is worth more if the 10 GB is spread unevenly across months. At several hundred GB a month the ranking can change; price your real volume on each page.
Oxylabs: the closest swap
Oxylabs sells the same two layers Bright Data does: residential proxies with the same IP for up to 24 hours, and a Web Scraper API with billing per 1,000 results from a plan starting at $30 a month that is shared with Oxylabs' other products, plus $5 of free welcome credit to try it. That makes it the comparison to run if your jobs call Bright Data's unblocking tools rather than a plain proxy.
Where it falls short: there is no residential pay-as-you-go plan on its page, and some advanced filters may require a KYC check of their own, so leaving Bright Data to avoid verification may not get you far.
Decodo and IPRoyal: smaller residential purchases
Decodo sells $4 a GB pay as you go, from 1 GB, with no monthly commitment, and offers a free 3-day trial with 100 MB and a 14-day money-back window on the first payment, only if the 3-day trial was not used and no more than 20% of the traffic was consumed. Its pricing page does not say how long pay-as-you-go traffic stays usable.
IPRoyal sells residential traffic that never expires, which changes the arithmetic for irregular jobs more than a lower per-GB rate does, and sticky sessions from 1 second up to 7 days. Neither sells a scraper API comparable to Bright Data's tools.
Node4: owned datacenter blocks and connection billing
Node4 is a proxy provider without a scraping API, so it fits teams that already run their own scraper. Its dedicated datacenter and rotating products use blocks Node4 owns in the United States, Italy and Spain. Dedicated proxies are billed per proxy per month with no data cap, so there is no per-IP allowance to track. Rotating Unmetered is priced by how many connections you hold open at once, starting at $29.00 a month for 250 connections, with no per-GB charge. Residential exits come from a partner network.
Where it falls short: owned datacenter exits stop at three countries, against Bright Data's 98 datacenter locations; there is no unblocker, browser or scraper API (a scraping API is in development), and no mobile product. If your Bright Data jobs depend on any of those, Node4 replaces only the proxy part.
When staying with Bright Data is the right call
Stay if your code calls Bright Data's unblocking or scraping browser products, or if you need datacenter exits in many countries from one account. Stay, too, if your residential volume already fits a monthly plan and the KYC step is behind you; at that point the reasons above no longer apply.
To test a replacement, list every Bright Data component your jobs call, then run the same targets, request rate and headers through the matching product at each candidate. Log the exit IP each request reports, the response status and whether your parser got the fields it needs. The guide to proxy performance testing shows a repeatable way to do that.