What Bright Data offers
Bright Data, founded in 2014 as Luminati Networks and headquartered in Israel, is the most established company in this market. Describing it as a proxy provider undersells it. It sells four proxy networks — residential, ISP, datacentre and mobile — and then a stack of managed products layered on top: Web Unlocker for single-endpoint retrieval with JavaScript rendering and anti-bot handling, a SERP API across the major search engines, a Scraping Browser compatible with Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium, pre-built scraper endpoints, and a large marketplace of ready-made datasets.
Its configuration model is built around zones. You create a zone per product and use case, and set that zone's concurrency ceiling, session behaviour, spend limit and sub-user permissions independently. That structure is why large teams like it and why individual users often describe the dashboard as heavy — the same design serves both audiences.
Bright Data also carries the compliance and legal posture of an enterprise vendor. Its residential pool is sourced through an SDK that partner applications ship with an explicit opt-in consent screen, its trust centre documents the sourcing and screening process in unusual detail, and the company has defended the legality of collecting public web data in court, including the Meta and X cases that were resolved in its favour. For a company whose legal team must sign off on a data supplier, that record is a real asset.
- Residential, ISP, datacentre and mobile networks under one account
- Managed unblocking, SERP and browser APIs, plus a dataset marketplace
- Zone-based configuration with per-zone concurrency, spend caps and sub-users
- Documented opt-in sourcing model and a public trust centre
- Account managers, custom SLAs and negotiated contracts at volume
When you should stay with Bright Data
If you are buying an outcome rather than an IP, Bright Data is the stronger fit and Nefo does not compete for that work. Web Unlocker, the SERP API and the Scraping Browser exist so that your team does not have to maintain fingerprinting, challenge handling and retry logic against heavily defended targets. Nefo is a proxy network. It gives you an IP and a route; everything above that layer stays your problem.
Three other situations point the same way. If procurement requires a signed SLA, a named account manager and a vendor security review, a self-serve prepaid provider will not clear that bar. If you need residential, ISP and datacentre pools plus datasets billed on one invoice, consolidation has genuine value. And if your legal function wants a supplier with a published compliance programme and litigation history behind it, that is precisely what Bright Data has spent a decade building.
How Nefo differs from Bright Data
The first difference is access. Bright Data's own documentation states that every residential request is reviewed by its compliance team and that approval is never automatic, instant or self-serve. In practice that means a corporate email domain, company registration documents, sometimes ID or video verification, and a use case that is approved in advance — requests to domains outside the approved scope are refused. Its ISP, datacentre and Web Unlocker products are available without that review. This is a deliberate compliance choice rather than a flaw, but it is friction, and for a freelancer, a research project or a team that needs to test an idea this week it can be the deciding factor.
The second is how bandwidth is held. Bright Data offers pay-as-you-go alongside cheaper commitment plans, but those discounts come attached to a monthly cycle rather than a balance that simply waits for you. Nefo's flexible plans are prepaid and non-expiring: bandwidth stays in the account until it is consumed. If your usage is spiky — a heavy month followed by two quiet ones — that difference changes your effective cost more than the headline per-gigabyte rate does.
The third is scope. Nefo sells residential proxies, static residential ISP IPs, mobile ports on real carrier modems, datacenter proxies, static IP proxies, IP Vault and servers, and nothing above them. That is still a narrower product than Bright Data's platform, and for some readers it is the wrong one. For a team that already has a working scraper and simply wants exit IPs, a narrower product means fewer concepts to learn before the first successful request.
How Nefo prepaid proxies work
You buy prepaid bandwidth starting at 5GB, generate credentials in the dashboard, and consume bandwidth only as traffic passes through them. Generating credentials costs nothing, so you can create separate credentials per project, per country or per session type without worrying about a per-zone charge.
Each credential carries its own protocol, geography and session behaviour. Protocols are HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, authenticated by username and password or by IP allowlist. Targeting covers 227 countries, state or region and city in most countries, and specific ASN or ISP within a country. Sessions are either rotating, taking a new IP per request, or sticky, holding the same IP from one minute up to 24 hours — long enough for multi-step logins and checkout flows without re-authenticating mid-journey.
The mobile product is structured differently from a metered mobile pool. It is a 4G or 5G port on a real carrier modem, rented by duration, from hours up to 30 days, carrying one live rotating carrier IP that you keep or change on demand, with US state and carrier targeting. Because it is billed by time rather than by the gigabyte, a long-running session with unpredictable transfer has a cost you can predict in advance.
- Prepaid from 5GB, flexible plans non-expiring
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, username and password or IP allowlist authentication
- 227 countries; state, city and ASN or ISP targeting in most countries
- Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Free credential generation — only traffic consumes bandwidth
- 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration, not metered per GB
How to migrate from Bright Data to Nefo
At the transport layer this is a small job. Both services use username and password authentication over HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, so the change is usually a host, port and credential swap in one configuration file. The work that takes longer is semantic, not mechanical. Session identifiers, rotation triggers and geo parameters are expressed differently by every provider, so the parts of your code that pin a session or select a country need rewriting rather than copying.
Do not migrate on a rate-card comparison. Per-gigabyte pricing only tells you what a byte costs, not what a usable record costs. Run both providers against the same target list for a day, then divide total spend by successful parsed responses on each. A cheaper pool that needs more retries on your particular targets is not cheaper. Bandwidth accounting also differs between providers in what it counts, which is another reason to measure on your own traffic rather than trusting a spreadsheet.
Migration does not have to be all or nothing. Keeping a Bright Data zone for the targets that genuinely need managed unblocking, while moving straightforward high-volume collection to prepaid bandwidth, is often the honest end state rather than a transitional step. Because Nefo bandwidth does not expire, a partial move does not create a balance that quietly burns down while you evaluate.
- Swap host, port and credentials; keep the rest of the client untouched
- Rewrite session-pinning and geo-selection syntax — it is provider-specific
- Benchmark on cost per successful parsed response, not per gigabyte
- Test your hardest targets first; easy targets tell you nothing
- Consider keeping a Bright Data zone for targets needing managed unblocking
Who should choose Bright Data and who Nefo
Bright Data suits organisations whose constraint is capability and compliance rather than budget: teams that need unblocking, SERP data or datasets as a managed service, that have procurement requirements a self-serve vendor cannot satisfy, and that have the engineering time to learn a deep platform properly. For those teams it is not overpriced — it is priced for what it does.
Nefo suits the case where the platform is not the point. A developer with a working scraper, a small team validating a market before committing budget, an agency running localised checks across countries, or anyone whose usage is irregular enough that a monthly cycle wastes more than it saves. Prepaid from 5GB, non-expiring, and credentials you generate yourself for residential use — with datacenter, static-IP and longer-held IP options available when the job calls for them.
The unhelpful answer is that one is better. The accurate one is that they solve different amounts of the problem. If you are paying for capability you use, stay. If you are paying for platform depth you never touch, the proxy layer alone is worth pricing.
Frequently asked questions
For the residential proxy layer, largely yes. Both support username and password authentication over HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 (Nefo also accepts an IP allowlist), so the change is a host and credential swap plus rewriting session and geo parameters. For Web Unlocker, the SERP API, the Scraping Browser or datasets, no. Nefo sells no managed unblocking or parsed data.
No review is part of buying: you purchase bandwidth from 5 GB and generate credentials in the dashboard. Bright Data's documentation says residential access needs a compliance review that is never automatic or self-serve. Either way, use is bound by the acceptable use policy, and accounts are suspended for abuse.
On Nefo's flexible plans, no. Bandwidth stays in the account until used, and the expiry type is shown on any promotional or subscription plan. Bright Data offers pay-as-you-go, but its discounted rates are tied to a monthly commitment cycle. For seasonal or project work, that difference often matters more than the per-GB figure.
Nefo covers 227 countries, state or region and city in most countries, and ASN or ISP targeting within a country. Check your specific city and ASN combinations on a small order before committing volume.
Nefo credentials are either rotating, with a new IP on every request, or sticky, holding one IP from 1 minute to 24 hours. Credentials are free, so you can run both side by side. Session syntax differs from Bright Data's zone model, so expect to rewrite that part of your client.
Yes, with a different shape. A Nefo mobile proxy is a 4G or 5G port on a real carrier modem rented from hours to 30 days, with one rotating carrier IP you keep or change on demand and US state and carrier targeting. It is billed by time, not per GB.