Smartproxy is now Decodo
If you are searching for a Smartproxy alternative, it helps to know that the brand you are comparing against has changed name. Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo in 2025 — new name, new logo, new domain at decodo.com. The company, the team, the infrastructure and the IP pool behind it are the same, existing accounts carried over, and older endpoints continued to work through the transition.
That matters here for one practical reason: any comparison written before the rebrand is describing the same service under the old name, and any comparison written after it may describe the same service without ever using the word Smartproxy. Everything below refers to that one company, and we use the name you searched for.
What Smartproxy (Decodo) does well
Smartproxy has been operating since 2018 out of Lithuania and built its reputation on being the approachable end of a market full of enterprise sales calls. You can sign up, read clear documentation and get a residential session running without speaking to anyone. Independent testers have rated its residential network well for speed and success rate over several consecutive years, and its support has a long-standing reputation for answering technical questions quickly rather than deflecting them.
It is also considerably broader than a proxy vendor. Alongside rotating residential IPs it sells static residential (ISP) addresses, shared and dedicated datacenter proxies, mobile proxies, browser extensions, and a set of scraping and unblocking APIs that handle the request-and-parse layer for you. It sources its residential pool transparently and is an active member of industry ethical-sourcing bodies. None of that is faint praise — for a team that wants one vendor covering several proxy types plus managed scraping, it is a well-run choice.
- Broad product line: residential, ISP/static, datacenter, mobile, plus scraping and unblocking APIs
- Self-serve onboarding with good documentation and code samples
- 24/7 live chat with technically competent agents
- Consistently strong showings in independent residential-proxy benchmarks
- Transparent, publicly documented approach to pool sourcing
Smartproxy subscription vs prepaid bandwidth
Smartproxy is subscription-oriented. Most residential usage sits on a monthly plan, and unused gigabytes from a plan generally do not carry into the next billing period unless you upgrade. A pay-as-you-go option exists for residential and mobile traffic at a higher unit rate, which softens this, but the default shape of the product is a recurring monthly commitment that you size in advance.
Nefo has no monthly cycle at all. You buy a prepaid bandwidth balance — the smallest is 5GB — and flexible plans are non-expiring, meaning the balance sits in the account until traffic actually consumes it. Generating credentials is free; only bytes through those credentials draw down the balance.
Whether that is an advantage depends entirely on how steady your consumption is. If you scrape 200GB every month like clockwork, a subscription priced for that volume is a rational purchase and the reset is irrelevant. If your work is bursty — a quarterly price study, a client project that lands unpredictably, a QA rig that idles for weeks — you are paying for a reset you keep hitting, and a prepaid balance is the better fit.
- Smartproxy: monthly plan sizing, unused traffic resets at cycle end, PAYG available at a higher rate
- Nefo: prepaid balance from 5GB, non-expiring on flexible plans, no recurring commitment
- Nefo charges for traffic only — credential generation is free and unlimited
- Top up at any time rather than waiting for a renewal date
Data platform vs focused proxy line
The second structural difference is scope, and this one cuts against Nefo as often as for it. Smartproxy sells most of the categories a data team might need. Nefo now covers residential proxies, 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, datacenter proxies, static IP proxies, IP Vault, servers and marketplace APIs. What it does not have are a scraping API or a managed unblocker; static residential ISP IPs are sold in 24 countries.
If you are currently using Smartproxy's scraping endpoints or its unblocker to avoid maintaining your own request logic, moving to Nefo means taking that logic back in-house. That is a real cost and it is the single most common reason a Smartproxy user should not switch. Conversely, if you only ever used the rotating residential endpoint and ignored the rest of the platform, you are paying for surface area you never touch.
What Nefo residential proxies give you
The residential network covers 227 countries and territories with HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, all authenticated with a username and password. Targeting is set in the username: country anywhere in the pool, United States down to state and city, region and city in a set of other countries including the UK, Canada, Germany and France, and ASN/ISP targeting so you can pin traffic to a specific carrier or cable operator within a country.
Sessions come in the two shapes most work needs. Rotating gives a new IP per request for wide distributed collection. Sticky holds one IP from a minute up to about 24 hours, configured per credential, which covers logins, multi-step checkouts and anything that breaks when the address changes mid-flow. Usage is visible per credential in the dashboard, so you can attribute consumption to a project rather than reading one aggregate number.
The mobile side is priced on a different axis from most competitors, including Smartproxy. Rather than buying mobile traffic by the gigabyte, you rent a 4G/5G port on a real carrier modem for a duration — hours through to 30 days — and get one live rotating carrier IP on it, which you can hold or change on demand, with US state- and carrier-level targeting. For sustained mobile work that removes per-GB anxiety entirely; for occasional mobile checks, per-GB is cheaper.
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, username/password authentication
- 227 countries and territories; US state and city; ASN/ISP targeting within a country
- Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to ~24 hours
- Mobile 4G/5G sold as a carrier-modem port per duration, not per gigabyte
- Per-credential usage tracking in the dashboard
How to switch from Smartproxy, and when to stay
Migration is a credential swap rather than a rewrite. Both services speak standard HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 with username/password auth, so in most codebases you are changing a host, a port and a pair of credentials. The one thing to redo deliberately is targeting: in Nefo you generate a separate credential per targeting combination you need, so map your existing session strings to a list of credentials before you cut over, then run both providers in parallel on the same jobs for a few days and compare success rates on your own target sites rather than on anyone's benchmark.
Stay with Smartproxy if you depend on its scraping or unblocking APIs, if you need static ISP lines from the same vendor in countries outside Nefo's 24, if your volume is high and predictable enough that a committed monthly plan prices better than prepaid, or if your team depends on Smartproxy's managed products. Those are legitimate reasons and no amount of per-gigabyte arithmetic overrides them.
Move to Nefo if your consumption is uneven, if you have watched unused gigabytes expire at a renewal date, if you want to trial a residential pool starting at 5GB rather than committing to a month, or if you want mobile ports on real carrier modems billed by time instead of traffic. The honest test is cheap: buy a small non-expiring balance, point one real job at it, and let the results decide.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo in 2025, moving from smartproxy.com to decodo.com. It was a name and branding change, not a change of ownership, infrastructure or IP pool, and existing accounts and integrations carried across. A Smartproxy alternative today means an alternative to Decodo's current product line.
The page does not compare Smartproxy's rates, so test your own volume. Nefo residential runs from $0.90/GB at 5 GB to $0.53/GB at 10 TB with no monthly reset. Where unused gigabytes lapse at the end of a billing period, prepaid non-expiring bandwidth tends to cost less in real terms. See pricing.
No. The prepaid balance stays on your account until traffic uses it, with no reset date. This is the clearest difference from a subscription-first model, where unused gigabytes generally lapse at the end of the billing period.
Mostly. If you connect over HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5 with a username and password, you change the host, port and credentials. Nefo also accepts an IP allowlist. Rebuild targeting deliberately: it goes in the username with tokens such as -country-us, -city-losangeles and -session-<id>.
Partly. Nefo sells datacenter proxies, static datacenter IPs and static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries, plus IP Vault. It does not replace Smartproxy's managed scraping or unblocking APIs. If those are load-bearing, stay or plan to keep more than one vendor.
The pricing axis differs. Nefo rents a dedicated 4G/5G port, from $30 per 30 days on the Economy plan, with unlimited IP changes and no meter, and also sells metered mobile proxies from $3.90/GB. For occasional mobile requests, per-gigabyte usually costs less.