Decodo vs. IPRoyal: Which proxy provider is right for you?

Picking between Decodo and IPRoyal comes down to one question: do you need raw performance at scale, or budget flexibility with bandwidth that never expires?

I've routed production scraping traffic through both providers over the past year. Decodo is faster and has a larger pool. IPRoyal costs less for small projects and won't burn your unused bandwidth at month-end. The right choice depends on how much data you move and how tight your margins are.

Decodo vs IPRoyal: What's the Difference?

The main difference between Decodo and IPRoyal is network size and pricing structure. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) operates 125M+ IPs with sub-second response times and charges on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis where unused bandwidth expires. IPRoyal runs a 32M+ IP pool with non-expiring bandwidth, meaning you only pay for what you actually use. For high-volume scraping, Decodo delivers better success rates. For unpredictable workloads, IPRoyal's flexibility wins.

Decodo vs IPRoyal at a Glance

Decodo is best for teams running large-scale scraping, SEO monitoring, or AI training pipelines. The 125M+ IP pool, 0.63s average response time, and 99.86% success rate mean fewer retries and faster data delivery. The tradeoff is that bandwidth expires monthly on subscription plans.

IPRoyal is best for freelancers, small teams, and anyone with variable workloads. The 32M+ residential IP pool covers 195+ countries, and the non-expiring bandwidth model means buying 50GB in January and using it through March is perfectly fine. Performance is solid but measurably slower.

Decodo Has a Larger, Faster Proxy Network

Pool size matters more than most people realize. A larger pool means lower odds of hitting a burned IP that a target site already flagged.

Decodo's 125M+ IPs include 115M+ residential addresses, 10M+ mobile IPs across 700+ ASNs, and 500K+ datacenter proxies. That's roughly 4x the size of IPRoyal's pool.

In practice, this means Decodo rotates through fresher IPs and hits fewer blocks on heavily protected targets like Amazon, Google Shopping, and LinkedIn.

IPRoyal's 32M+ pool is respectable for a provider founded in 2020. They source residential IPs through their Pawns.app program, where users voluntarily share bandwidth in exchange for payment.

The pool covers 195+ countries, but IP density in specific cities is thinner than Decodo's.

Here's what this looks like in a real scraping run. Set up a basic rotating proxy connection with Decodo:

import requests

# Decodo rotating residential proxy
proxy = {
    "http": "http://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000",
    "https": "http://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000"
}

response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxy,
    timeout=10
)
print(response.json())  # New IP on every request

The same setup with IPRoyal looks nearly identical:

import requests

# IPRoyal rotating residential proxy
proxy = {
    "http": "http://USER:PASS@geo.iproyal.com:12321",
    "https": "http://USER:PASS@geo.iproyal.com:12321"
}

response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxy,
    timeout=10
)
print(response.json())  # New IP on every request

Both use standard HTTP proxy authentication. The difference shows up under load. Decodo's infrastructure handles 40% more concurrent connections according to independent benchmarks, which matters when you're making thousands of requests per minute.

IPRoyal's Non-Expiring Bandwidth Changes the Math

This is IPRoyal's killer feature, and most comparison articles gloss over it.

With Decodo, if you buy a 50GB subscription plan and only use 35GB that month, the remaining 15GB vanishes. That's $73.50 in wasted bandwidth at their $4.90/GB rate.

Do that three months in a row and you've burned over $200 on data you never used.

IPRoyal's residential bandwidth never expires. Buy 100GB, use 10GB this month, 30GB next month, and the remaining 60GB sits in your account until you need it.

For anyone with seasonal workloads — price monitoring during holidays, scraping during product launch windows, periodic SEO audits — this model is dramatically cheaper in practice.

The math flips at high volume though. Once you're consistently burning 500GB+ monthly, Decodo's bulk pricing ($3.00/GB at 1TB) and higher success rate make the per-successful-request cost lower. More on that below.

The Real Cost Isn't Per-GB — It's Per Successful Request

Most proxy comparisons stop at the sticker price per gigabyte. That's the wrong metric.

What actually matters is the cost per successful data retrieval. A cheaper proxy that fails 5% more often wastes bandwidth on retries, burns through your allocation faster, and slows your pipeline.

Here's a rough cost-per-success calculation based on independent Proxyway benchmarks:

Against easy targets where both succeed 99%+ of the time, IPRoyal's bulk pricing wins. The savings from non-expiring bandwidth compound further.

Against protected targets (e-commerce, search engines, social platforms), Decodo's 92% success rate versus IPRoyal's 74% means you need roughly 35% more bandwidth on IPRoyal to get the same data. That erases the price advantage and then some.

Bottom line: IPRoyal is cheaper for light scraping of unprotected sites. Decodo is cheaper per successful request on anything with anti-bot protection.

Decodo Includes Scraping Tools; IPRoyal Doesn't

Decodo ships with built-in tools that IPRoyal simply doesn't offer:

Web Scraping API handles proxy rotation, retries, and JavaScript rendering behind a single endpoint. Send a URL, get back clean HTML or parsed JSON. It's overkill for simple requests but saves serious development time on JS-heavy targets.

Site Unblocker is built for sites with aggressive anti-bot systems. It manages browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, and header rotation automatically.

Decodo claims a 100% success rate with it, though that comes at a higher per-GB cost ($10/GB+).

AI Parser takes raw HTML and extracts structured data using natural language prompts. Point it at a product page and ask for "price, title, availability" — it returns clean JSON.

IPRoyal takes a different approach: provide the raw proxies and let you build your own scraping logic. If you already have a mature scraping stack with custom retry logic, fingerprint rotation, and a parsing pipeline, this is fine.

You're not paying for tools you won't use.

If you're starting from scratch or want to ship faster, Decodo's tooling saves weeks of development time.

Geo-Targeting: Decodo Goes Deeper

Both providers cover 195+ countries. The difference is granularity.

Decodo lets you target by country, state, city, ZIP code, and ASN/ISP. That ZIP-level precision matters for localized pricing intelligence, ad verification, and SERP tracking. You can request an IP from a specific carrier (AT&T, Vodafone, Orange) on mobile proxies.

IPRoyal targets by country, state, and city. No ZIP-level targeting, no ASN selection on residential proxies. For most scraping jobs, country and city are enough. But if you need to verify that a Google ad appears correctly in a specific postal code, Decodo handles it and IPRoyal doesn't.

Mobile Proxies: Decodo's Pool Is 4x Larger

Mobile IPs carry the highest trust scores and are hardest for target sites to block. Both providers offer them, but at very different scales.

Decodo operates 10M+ mobile IPs across 160+ locations and 700+ ASNs covering 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. IPRoyal's mobile pool sits at 2.5M+ IPs with country, state, city, and carrier selection.

Decodo mobile proxies start at around $8/GB on pay-as-you-go plans. IPRoyal's mobile proxies are sold as monthly slots ($130/month for rotating, with discounts on longer terms) with unlimited bandwidth — a completely different model.

For social media management where you need persistent mobile IPs, IPRoyal's unlimited-bandwidth mobile slots can be more cost-effective. For large-scale mobile scraping where you need constant IP rotation across hundreds of carriers, Decodo's larger pool reduces block rates.

Pricing Breakdown: Decodo vs IPRoyal

Here's what you'll actually pay at common usage levels:

Residential Proxies

IPRoyal's per-GB pricing is lower at almost every tier. But remember: Decodo's subscription bandwidth expires monthly, IPRoyal's doesn't. If you consistently use your full allocation, Decodo's higher success rate offsets the price gap on difficult targets.

Datacenter Proxies

Decodo starts at $0.026/IP for shared datacenter proxies with unlimited bandwidth. IPRoyal's dedicated datacenter proxies start at $1.39/month per IP with unlimited bandwidth.

ISP (Static Residential) Proxies

Decodo offers ISP proxies starting at $0.27/IP with pay-per-IP or pay-per-GB models. IPRoyal's ISP proxies start at $2/day per proxy or $3.60/month with unlimited traffic.

Free Trials

Decodo offers a 3-day free trial with 100MB of residential bandwidth, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans.

IPRoyal has no free trial. They offer a 1-day proxy testing option at minimal cost and a 24-hour refund window.

Compliance and Ethical Sourcing

Both providers claim ethical IP sourcing, but through different mechanisms. This matters if your legal or compliance team needs to sign off on proxy usage.

Decodo sources IPs through SDK integrations and peer-to-business networks with documented consent chains. They hold ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and are a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI). Their documentation explains consent mechanisms in reasonable detail. If you're scraping for an enterprise client or building datasets for AI training, Decodo's compliance paper trail is stronger.

IPRoyal sources residential IPs primarily through Pawns.app, their proprietary application where users opt in to share bandwidth for payment. The consent model is straightforward: users download an app, accept terms, and get paid for sharing idle bandwidth. IPRoyal is GDPR and CCPA compliant with KYC policies for new customers.

Neither approach is inherently better. Both involve real users sharing bandwidth voluntarily. Decodo's certification and EWDCI membership carry more weight if you need to demonstrate compliance to enterprise clients or legal teams. IPRoyal's Pawns model is simpler to explain and audit.

One edge case worth noting: Decodo supports UDP protocol on request, which IPRoyal doesn't. For the vast majority of HTTP-based scraping, this doesn't matter. But if you're running real-time data streams, DNS resolution testing, or gaming-related proxy use cases, UDP support is a requirement that only Decodo meets in this comparison.

Customer Support and Documentation

Decodo provides 24/7 live chat, email support, and extensive documentation with code examples for Python, Node.js, and cURL. Their dashboard includes a proxy endpoint generator, live usage stats, spending analytics, and sub-user management with role-based permissions. ProxyWay and G2 (4.7/5) rate their support highly. They also maintain integration guides for popular third-party tools like Puppeteer, Playwright, Scrapy, and anti-detect browsers.

IPRoyal offers 24/7 live chat, email, and Discord support. Their help center covers setup basics and common configurations but is thinner on advanced use cases like headless browser integration or custom rotation logic. Independent reviews note average response times of 2-3 hours for complex technical issues, though basic questions get answered faster. Trustpilot ratings sit at 4.6/5 from 3,800+ reviews, with most complaints centering on occasional IP quality dips rather than support responsiveness.

For developers building production scraping pipelines, Decodo's API docs, code templates, and endpoint generator save measurable setup time. For users who just need to configure a browser extension or set up a basic proxy connection, IPRoyal's documentation is perfectly adequate.

Session Control: Sticky vs Rotating

How you manage proxy sessions determines whether your scraper gets blocked or stays under the radar. Both Decodo and IPRoyal handle this, but with different defaults and limits.

Decodo offers rotating sessions (new IP per request) and sticky sessions configurable up to 30 minutes on residential proxies. ISP proxies stay fixed indefinitely — same IP until you manually rotate. You control session type through the proxy endpoint URL by appending session parameters.

Setting up a sticky session with Decodo takes one line change:

# Decodo sticky session — same IP for up to 30 minutes
proxy = {
    "http": "http://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000",
    "https": "http://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000"
}
# Add session ID to username: user-SESSION_ID
# e.g., user-abc123:password@gate.decodo.com:7000

Each unique session ID maintains the same IP. When the TTL expires, you get a new one automatically.

IPRoyal supports sticky sessions lasting up to 7 days on residential proxies — significantly longer than Decodo's 30-minute cap. They also added a "rotate all sessions" button in the dashboard that instantly terminates and replaces every active IP with one click.

For account management tasks (managing social media profiles, e-commerce accounts), IPRoyal's 7-day sticky sessions are a major advantage. You keep the same IP across multiple login sessions without reconnecting.

For scraping, Decodo's 30-minute window is typically enough. Most scraping jobs don't benefit from sessions longer than a few minutes anyway, since rotating IPs is the whole point.

Common Setup Issues and Fixes

After testing both providers across different environments, here are the errors you'll actually hit and how to fix them:

"407 Proxy Authentication Required"

Why: Incorrect username/password format. Both providers encode targeting parameters into the username string, and a single typo breaks authentication.

Fix for Decodo: Double-check that your username follows the format user-USERNAME-country-XX. The country code must be lowercase ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (e.g., us, gb, de).

Fix for IPRoyal: IPRoyal uses a similar format: username-country-XX-session-RANDOM. Make sure there are no spaces and the session ID is alphanumeric.

"Connection timed out" on SOCKS5

Why: Your HTTP client library might not support SOCKS5 natively. Python's requests library doesn't handle SOCKS without an extra package.

Fix: Install requests[socks] and use the socks5h:// protocol prefix instead of socks5://. The h tells the proxy to handle DNS resolution, which prevents DNS leaks:

pip install requests[socks]

proxy = {
    "http": "socks5h://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000",
    "https": "socks5h://USER:PASS@gate.decodo.com:7000"
}

This works identically for both Decodo and IPRoyal — just swap the gateway address.

High block rates on specific targets

Why: Using datacenter proxies on sites that specifically block datacenter IP ranges, or using a small geographic pool that gets burned quickly.

Fix: Switch to residential or mobile proxies for that target. If you're already on residential and still getting blocked, enable country-level targeting to rotate through a larger regional pool instead of city-level. On Decodo, try their Site Unblocker for the toughest targets. On IPRoyal, consider increasing your rotation frequency or spreading requests across more geolocations.

Is IPRoyal Legit?

Yes. IPRoyal is a registered company based in Lithuania that's been operating since 2020. They hold a 4.6/5 rating on Trustpilot from 3,800+ verified reviews, and they're listed on major software comparison platforms like G2 and SourceForge.

Their residential IPs are ethically sourced through the Pawns.app program, where real users opt in to share bandwidth. IPRoyal is GDPR and CCPA compliant, requires KYC verification for new accounts, and uses SSL encryption across their infrastructure.

The most common complaints in negative reviews center on occasional IP quality dips and slower support response times for complex issues — not scam concerns.

For cold email campaigns and social media management, users specifically praise their static residential IPs for avoiding spam filters and IP bans.

If you're worried about legitimacy, IPRoyal's pay-as-you-go model with no long-term contracts makes it low-risk to test. You're not locked in.

Is Decodo (Smartproxy) Reliable?

Decodo has operated since 2018 under the Smartproxy name before rebranding in April 2025. Seven years in the proxy market is a long track record.

Independent benchmarks back up the reliability claims. Proxyway's 2025 Market Research measured Decodo at a 99.86% infrastructure success rate with a 0.63s average response time — the fastest among mid-market providers.

They've won Proxyway's "Best Value Provider" award four consecutive years.

On review platforms, Decodo holds a 4.7/5 on G2, 4.4/5 on Trustpilot, and earned a Cybernews recommendation as a top residential proxy provider.

The most frequent criticism is their bandwidth expiration policy on subscription plans — a real issue if your usage is unpredictable, but not a reliability problem.

Their ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and EWDCI founding membership add enterprise credibility.

For teams that need to show auditors or legal counsel that their data collection infrastructure meets compliance standards, Decodo has the paper trail.

What Users Say: Reviews and Reddit

Review scores only tell part of the story. Here's the actual sentiment from people using these proxies in production.

Decodo Reviews

G2 reviewers consistently highlight the dashboard quality, API documentation, and scraping tool integrations. The negative pattern is predictable: users who buy subscription plans and don't use their full allocation feel burned by expiring bandwidth.

On Reddit, developers running large scraping operations tend to favor Decodo for protected targets.

One user on r/WebDataDiggers reported routing 90% of traffic through Decodo while keeping IPRoyal as a backup for specific geo-locations — a split approach that matches the recommendation in this article.

The Smartproxy-to-Decodo rebrand confused some users initially, but the product itself didn't change. Same IPs, same infrastructure, same dashboard.

IPRoyal Reviews

Trustpilot reviews praise the pricing flexibility and non-expiring bandwidth. Users managing social media accounts and running cold email campaigns are particularly vocal supporters.

The negative reviews cluster around two issues: IP quality inconsistency (some users report higher block rates during peak hours) and support response times that can stretch to 2-3 hours for technical problems.

Reddit sentiment on IPRoyal skews positive for budget-conscious users. The non-expiring bandwidth model gets mentioned repeatedly as the reason people stick with it, even when they acknowledge Decodo performs better on difficult targets.

The Pattern

Power users who scrape at volume and need high success rates gravitate toward Decodo. Solo operators, freelancers, and small teams who value pricing predictability lean toward IPRoyal.

Neither camp reports major reliability failures — the debate is about optimization, not trust.

Decodo vs IPRoyal: Which Should You Choose?

The decision comes down to workload volume and predictability.

Choose Decodo if:

• You scrape protected targets (e-commerce, search engines, social platforms) where success rate directly impacts cost
• You need 500GB+ monthly and can reliably consume your allocation
• ZIP-level geo-targeting or ASN selection is a requirement
• You want built-in scraping APIs to move faster without building custom tooling
• Enterprise compliance documentation matters for your organization

Choose IPRoyal if:

• Your bandwidth usage is unpredictable or seasonal and you can't afford to waste unused data
• You're working with a tight budget on light-to-medium scraping of unprotected sites
• You need mobile proxy slots with unlimited bandwidth for social media management
• You already have a mature scraping stack and just need reliable raw proxies
• You're getting started with proxies and want zero monthly commitment

If you need both reliability and flexible pricing, consider a split approach: use Decodo for high-value, high-difficulty targets where success rate matters, and IPRoyal for bulk scraping of easier sites where you want non-expiring bandwidth.

For teams that need even larger IP pools with sub-second response times and unlimited bandwidth, providers like Roundproxies offer 180M+ IPs with competitive enterprise pricing worth evaluating.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which proxy provider is best: Decodo or IPRoyal?

Neither is universally "best." Decodo leads on performance metrics — 125M+ IPs, 99.86% success rate, 0.63s response time — and is the stronger choice for high-volume scraping against protected targets. IPRoyal leads on pricing flexibility with non-expiring bandwidth and lower per-GB costs at small-to-medium volumes. Pick based on your workload, not brand reputation.

How much do Decodo and IPRoyal cost?

Decodo residential proxies start at $3.50/GB on pay-as-you-go and drop to ~$1.50/GB at enterprise scale (1TB+). IPRoyal residential proxies start at $7.00/GB on pay-as-you-go but drop to ~$1.75/GB when buying 10TB in bulk.

IPRoyal's bandwidth never expires, so the effective cost can be lower if you don't use your allocation immediately. Decodo's subscription bandwidth expires monthly.

What is a good alternative to IPRoyal?

Decodo is the closest mid-market alternative, with a larger IP pool and better success rates at a similar price tier. For enterprise budgets, Bright Data (150M+ IPs) and Oxylabs (177M+ IPs) offer premium features.

For teams needing large pools with unlimited bandwidth, Roundproxies provides 180M+ IPs starting at $2.10/GB. SOAX (155M+ IPs) is strong for users who prioritize IP cleanliness over raw pool size.

Can I use Decodo and IPRoyal together?

Yes, and it's a smart strategy. Route high-difficulty targets (e-commerce sites, search engines, social platforms with anti-bot systems) through Decodo for the higher success rate. Route easy targets and bulk scraping jobs through IPRoyal for the non-expiring bandwidth savings.

Most proxy management libraries like requests, httpx, and Scrapy middleware let you configure multiple proxy backends per target domain.

Did Smartproxy change its name to Decodo?

Yes. Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo in April 2025. The product, infrastructure, IP pool, and pricing remained the same.

The rebrand reflects an expanded focus beyond proxy services to include AI-powered scraping tools, data parsing, and web intelligence. If you see older articles referencing "Smartproxy," they're talking about the same provider.