IPRoyal vs. Bright Data: Which proxy provider wins?

Picking the wrong proxy provider doesn't just cost money. It costs time rebuilding scrapers, debugging failed requests, and explaining to your team why the data pipeline broke at 2 AM.

IPRoyal and Bright Data are two of the most talked-about names in the proxy space. But they target very different users, and choosing between them comes down to your budget, your scale, and how much you care about raw success rates versus keeping costs predictable.

I've used both services across production scraping projects, tested them against protected targets, and dug into third-party benchmarks. Here's what actually matters.

IPRoyal vs. Bright Data: What's the Difference?

The main difference between IPRoyal and Bright Data is their target market and pricing model. IPRoyal offers budget-friendly proxies with non-expiring traffic and simple per-GB pricing, making it ideal for small-to-mid-size projects. Bright Data provides an enterprise-grade network with 150M+ IPs, advanced unblocking tools, and higher success rates — at a significantly higher price. For cost-sensitive scraping, choose IPRoyal. For mission-critical data collection at scale, go with Bright Data.

Side-by-Side Comparison

That table tells part of the story. The rest is in the details.

IPRoyal's Network Is Smaller but Its Pricing Is Transparent

IPRoyal launched in 2020 and has grown fast by doing one thing well: making proxies affordable and easy to buy.

Their residential pool sits at around 32 million IPs across 195 countries. That's a fraction of Bright Data's 150M+, but pool size alone doesn't tell you much. What matters is whether the IPs you actually get are clean, diverse, and not already burned on your target sites.

The pricing model is where IPRoyal earns loyalty. Residential traffic starts at $7/GB for pay-as-you-go and drops to $1.75/GB at bulk volumes. That traffic never expires — buy 100 GB today, use it over six months, no penalty.

No monthly minimums. No contracts. No expiring credits.

For datacenter proxies, IPRoyal charges per IP with unlimited bandwidth. Starting at $1.39/IP, you can run as much traffic as you want without watching a bandwidth meter tick up.

This flat-fee model removes the cost anxiety that comes with pay-per-GB datacenter pricing. If you're scraping high-bandwidth pages (lots of images, JavaScript), unlimited bandwidth changes the math entirely.

The Dashboard and Developer Experience

IPRoyal's dashboard is minimal in the best sense. Sign up with an email, verify with a one-time code, add funds, and you're provisioning proxies within a minute.

No sales calls. No KYC hoops. No waiting for account approval.

The API is straightforward — standard REST endpoints for managing sub-users, checking balance, and generating proxy credentials. Recent additions include a "rotate all sessions" button that force-refreshes every active IP with one click.

For developers who just want an endpoint URL and credentials, this no-friction onboarding is a genuine advantage over Bright Data's more involved setup process.

Where IPRoyal Falls Short

The smaller pool means less IP diversity in niche geolocations. If you need ZIP-code-level targeting in specific US metros, you'll hit limits fast.

Independent testing from Proxyway found that IPRoyal's US pool returned only around 62,000 unique IPs with location filters enabled. Roughly 11% of those were flagged as datacenter IPs rather than genuine residential addresses. That's a problem if you're targeting sites with sophisticated bot detection.

ASN targeting is restricted to high-spend custom plans. And there's no built-in CAPTCHA solver or unblocking middleware — you handle anti-bot bypass logic yourself.

Session control is actually a strength, though. Sticky sessions hold an IP for up to 7 days, which is far more flexible than Bright Data's 60-second cap on residential stickies. For account management or checkout flows that need session persistence, this is a meaningful differentiator.

Bright Data Is Built for Enterprise Scale

Bright Data (formerly Luminati) has been around since 2014 and operates one of the largest proxy networks on the planet.

The numbers are hard to ignore: 150M+ residential IPs, 7M+ mobile IPs, and 1.3M+ datacenter IPs spread across 195+ countries. Independent testing from Proxyway consistently shows Bright Data returning five times more unique IPs than IPRoyal for the same number of requests.

Where this matters is target diversity. If you're scraping across dozens of countries and need granular geo-targeting down to ZIP code or ASN, Bright Data's pool density gives you options IPRoyal simply can't match.

The Feature Gap Is Real

Bright Data isn't just selling IPs. They sell an ecosystem — and for enterprise buyers, that ecosystem justifies the premium.

The Web Unlocker handles browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, and retry logic at the proxy level. You send a request, it comes back unblocked. You don't write the bypass code yourself. For teams scraping targets like Google, Amazon, or social platforms, this saves hundreds of engineering hours.

The Proxy Manager is an open-source tool that lets you build routing rules, test configurations, and manage proxies from multiple providers in one dashboard. It's genuinely useful even if you're not exclusively a Bright Data customer.

Then there's the Scraping Browser (a headless browser that routes through their proxy network), SERP API, and Web Scraper IDE — a full suite of data collection tools layered on top of the proxy infrastructure.

Bright Data also offers dedicated residential IPs that persist indefinitely. IPRoyal only provides shared, rotating residential proxies. If your use case requires owning a specific residential IP long-term, Bright Data is one of very few providers that can do this.

For teams that need turnkey unblocking and don't want to maintain custom bypass code, this feature set is significant. But if you prefer to control your own scraping logic and only need clean rotating IPs, most of these extras go unused — and you're paying for them regardless.

Onboarding and Support

Bright Data's signup requires a name, business email, and company size. For residential and mobile proxy access, you'll go through a KYC (Know Your Customer) process that may include a video call.

This is slower than IPRoyal's instant signup, but it serves a purpose. The KYC process filters out abusive users and keeps the network cleaner.

Support is multilingual with dedicated account managers on higher-tier plans. For enterprise clients, you can negotiate SLAs with guaranteed uptime and response times. IPRoyal's support is responsive but geared toward self-service users.

The Price You Pay

Bright Data's pricing is more complex and substantially higher.

Residential proxies start at $8.40/GB pay-as-you-go. Subscription plans begin at $499/month (roughly $7.14/GB for 70 GB). Traffic expires at the end of the billing period.

Datacenter proxies can be purchased per-IP (starting at $0.90/IP for 1,000 IPs) or per-GB ($0.60/GB pay-as-you-go). But bandwidth overages on dedicated IPs can add up.

The minimum monthly commitment of $499 on subscription plans puts Bright Data out of reach for hobbyists and small teams. This is enterprise pricing, and it's designed for enterprise budgets.

Performance: The Numbers That Matter

Raw benchmarks from third-party testing (Proxyway, AIMultiple) paint a consistent picture.

A 1% difference in success rate sounds trivial until you multiply it across a million requests. At that scale, IPRoyal's ~98% success means roughly 20,000 failed requests. Bright Data's ~99% means around 10,000.

Those extra failures mean retries, which burn additional bandwidth, which eats into IPRoyal's cost advantage.

The Real Cost: Price Per Successful Request

This is the calculation most comparison articles skip.

Let's say you need 1 million successful responses from a moderately protected site. Each response is about 500 KB.

IPRoyal scenario (residential, bulk pricing at $1.75/GB):

• Requests needed at 98% success: ~1,020,408
• Total bandwidth: ~500 GB
• Cost: ~$875
• Cost per successful request: $0.000875

Bright Data scenario (residential, $7.14/GB subscription):

• Requests needed at 99.2% success: ~1,008,065
• Total bandwidth: ~490 GB
• Cost: ~$3,499
• Cost per successful request: $0.0035

IPRoyal is still roughly 4x cheaper per successful request in this scenario. The success rate gap narrows the savings, but doesn't close them.

Where this flips: on heavily protected targets (sneaker sites, airline aggregators, major social platforms), Bright Data's Web Unlocker can push success rates above 99.5%. IPRoyal without custom bypass logic might drop below 90%, making retries and wasted bandwidth far more expensive.

Setting Up Each Provider in Your Stack

Both providers support standard proxy authentication. Here's what integration actually looks like.

IPRoyal with Python Requests

Configure rotating residential proxies with a simple user:pass authentication string:

import requests

proxy_url = "http://customer-USERNAME:PASSWORD@geo.iproyal.com:12321"

proxies = {
    "http": proxy_url,
    "https": proxy_url,
}

response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxies,
    timeout=30  # IPRoyal can be slower; set a generous timeout
)
print(response.json())

The geo.iproyal.com:12321 endpoint handles rotation automatically. To pin a sticky session, append _session-SESSION_ID_lifetime-30m to your username.

Bright Data with Python Requests

Bright Data uses a similar pattern but with a different hostname and zone-based auth:

import requests

proxy_url = "http://brd-customer-CUSTOMER_ID-zone-ZONE_NAME:PASSWORD@brd.superproxy.io:33335"

proxies = {
    "http": proxy_url,
    "https": proxy_url,
}

response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxies,
    timeout=15  # Bright Data is typically faster
)
print(response.json())

For country targeting, append -country-us to the username string. For city-level: -country-us-city-newyork. Bright Data also supports -zip-10001 for ZIP targeting.

Adding Proxy Rotation to Scrapy

If you're running Scrapy, drop this middleware into your project and point it at either provider:

# middlewares.py
import base64

class ProxyMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, proxy_url):
        self.proxy_url = proxy_url

    @classmethod
    def from_crawler(cls, crawler):
        return cls(
            proxy_url=crawler.settings.get("PROXY_URL")
        )

    def process_request(self, request, spider):
        request.meta["proxy"] = self.proxy_url

In settings.py, set PROXY_URL to either provider's endpoint. The middleware handles the rest.

This works identically for both IPRoyal and Bright Data. The difference shows up in what happens when requests fail — with Bright Data's Web Unlocker, you'd use a different endpoint (unblocker.brightdata.com) that retries and solves CAPTCHAs automatically.

Ethical Sourcing and Compliance

Both providers claim to source residential IPs ethically through opt-in programs. But the depth of their compliance frameworks differs considerably.

Bright Data has been in the spotlight more on this front, partly because of its origins as a division of Hola VPN. They've since established a formal compliance program with KYC requirements for residential and mobile proxy access. GDPR and CCPA compliance are built into their framework, and they maintain published compliance documentation.

IPRoyal also uses an opt-in model for residential IPs and has steadily improved their compliance posture. Their KYC process is lighter — email verification and you're provisioned.

For enterprise buyers in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, e-commerce), Bright Data's heavier compliance process is actually a selling point. It means your usage is auditable and the network is less likely to harbor bad actors who could get entire IP ranges blacklisted.

Common Issues and How to Handle Them

"Connection timed out" with IPRoyal

This usually happens during peak traffic hours when their smaller pool is under heavy load. Increase your timeout to 30–45 seconds, and implement retry logic with exponential backoff. If timeouts persist on a specific country pool, try broadening your geo-target.

"407 Proxy Authentication Required" with Bright Data

Your zone credentials are likely misconfigured. Double-check that your customer ID, zone name, and password are correct in the proxy URL string. Bright Data's zone-based auth is more complex than IPRoyal's flat credentials.

Low success rates on protected targets

If you're getting blocked more than expected with either provider, the fix depends on which one you're using. With Bright Data, switch to the Web Unlocker endpoint — it handles fingerprinting and CAPTCHAs automatically. With IPRoyal, you'll need to add your own request headers, browser fingerprints, and CAPTCHA solving.

Unexpected bandwidth costs with Bright Data

Bright Data's per-GB billing means failed requests still consume bandwidth. Monitor your usage dashboard closely during testing phases, and set spending alerts to avoid surprises on your first invoice.

When IPRoyal Wins

Pick IPRoyal when your project fits these profiles.

Budget is the primary constraint. At $1.75/GB for residential and $1.39/IP for unlimited-bandwidth datacenter proxies, nothing at this quality level comes cheaper. If you're a solo developer or a small team watching every dollar, this is where you start.

You scrape irregularly. Non-expiring traffic means you buy once and use whenever. No wasted spend from unused monthly allotments. I've had IPRoyal credits sitting for months between projects with zero penalty.

You build your own bypass logic. If you're already handling CAPTCHAs, fingerprinting, and retries in your code, you don't need Bright Data's unblocking tools. You just need clean IPs at a good price.

Long sticky sessions matter. Up to 7 days on the same IP beats Bright Data's 60-second residential session limit by orders of magnitude. This is useful for account management, social media workflows, and any task requiring session persistence across multiple page loads.

Datacenter proxies are your primary use case. The unlimited bandwidth model at $1.39/IP is hard to beat. No per-GB metering, no overage fees. For high-bandwidth targets, this pricing model wins outright.

When Bright Data Wins

Pick Bright Data when your project matches these patterns.

You scrape heavily protected targets at scale. The Web Unlocker alone justifies the premium when you'd otherwise spend weeks building and maintaining custom bypass logic. On targets like Amazon, Google Shopping, or airline sites, the success rate difference between managed unblocking and raw proxies can be 15–20 percentage points.

You need granular geo-targeting. ZIP-code and ASN targeting backed by 150M+ IPs — no other provider does this as well. If your use case requires emulating users from specific neighborhoods or ISPs, this is non-negotiable.

Compliance and auditing matter. Enterprise KYC, dedicated account managers, formal SLAs, and published compliance documentation make Bright Data the safer choice for publicly traded companies and regulated industries.

You want managed infrastructure. Proxy Manager, Scraping Browser, and the Web Scraper IDE let you move faster at the cost of vendor lock-in. For teams that value speed-to-production over architectural independence, this tradeoff makes sense.

Your budget starts at $500/month or higher. If you're spending less than that on proxies, Bright Data's minimum commitments and per-GB pricing will feel punitive. Above that threshold, the performance and features start to justify themselves.

What Reddit Users Say About IPRoyal and Bright Data

If you search Reddit for proxy provider discussions, you'll find strong opinions on both sides — and the consensus maps closely to what the benchmarks show.

IPRoyal gets consistently positive mentions for affordability. Users in r/scrapingtheweb and r/datamining call it "super affordable" and report solid results on e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Footsites. The non-expiring traffic model comes up repeatedly as a reason people stick with IPRoyal over competitors with monthly caps.

The complaints center on IP pool quality under pressure. Some Reddit users report occasional connectivity issues and slower response times during peak hours. Users scraping heavily protected targets (SNKRS, Google, major social platforms) note that success rates drop noticeably compared to premium providers.

Bright Data's Reddit reputation is more polarized. Users praise the network size and Web Unlocker's effectiveness, but pricing complaints dominate the threads. Multiple users report feeling locked into expensive plans, and the complexity of zone-based configuration frustrates developers who just want a proxy URL and credentials.

The common Reddit wisdom boils down to this: IPRoyal for budget-conscious projects where you control your own scraping logic, Bright Data when you need enterprise reliability and can justify the spend.

Is IPRoyal Reliable?

This is one of the most-searched questions about the provider, and the honest answer is: it depends on your use case.

For standard web scraping at moderate scale, IPRoyal is reliable. Their Trustpilot score sits at 4.6/5 across 1,100+ reviews, and most users report stable connections, good speeds, and responsive support.

Where reliability gets shaky is on heavily protected targets and under high concurrency. Independent testing from Proxyway showed IPRoyal's success rates dropping below 90% on certain targets — significantly below the 99%+ that enterprise providers achieve.

IPRoyal sources residential IPs through their Pawns app, where real users opt in to share bandwidth. This keeps costs low, but it means session stability depends partly on whether the contributing user stays online. Sticky sessions can hold for up to 7 days in theory, but some users report sessions dropping earlier than expected.

The bottom line: IPRoyal is reliable enough for most scraping, SEO monitoring, and account management tasks. It's not the provider you want if your business depends on 99.9% uptime against aggressive anti-bot systems.

Not Sold on Either? Other Providers to Consider

IPRoyal and Bright Data sit at opposite ends of the proxy market. If neither fits, two other providers fill the gap between them.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs operates the largest proxy pool globally at 175M+ IPs and delivers a 99.95% success rate with 0.6-second average response times — faster and more reliable than both IPRoyal and Bright Data in independent benchmarks.

The catch is pricing. Oxylabs starts at $75/month for 8 GB of residential traffic and requires contacting sales for custom plans. Like Bright Data, it targets enterprise buyers and uses per-GB billing that makes cost forecasting harder than IPRoyal's flat-rate model.

If you need Bright Data-level performance without its ecosystem lock-in, Oxylabs is the closest alternative.

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)

Decodo hits the sweet spot between IPRoyal's affordability and Bright Data's performance. Residential proxies cost around $2.20/GB — roughly 80% less than Bright Data — while delivering 99.68% success rates and the fastest response times in independent testing at 0.54 seconds.

The pool is smaller at 65M IPs (double IPRoyal, half of Bright Data), and traffic expires monthly rather than being non-expiring like IPRoyal. But for teams that outgrow IPRoyal and can't justify Bright Data's pricing, Decodo is the natural middle ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Bright Data and IPRoyal?

Bright Data is an enterprise-focused proxy and data collection platform with 150M+ IPs, built-in unblocking tools, and scraping APIs. IPRoyal is a budget-friendly proxy provider with 32M+ IPs, simpler pricing, and non-expiring traffic. Bright Data offers more features and higher success rates; IPRoyal offers lower prices and a simpler user experience.

Who are Bright Data's main competitors?

The primary competitors are Oxylabs (175M+ IPs, $10/GB residential, 99.95% success rate), Decodo (65M+ IPs, ~$2.20/GB, 99.68% success rate), and IPRoyal (32M+ IPs, $1.75/GB bulk, ~98% success rate). Oxylabs competes on performance, Decodo on price-to-performance ratio, and IPRoyal on raw affordability.

Is Bright Data worth the price?

For enterprise operations scraping protected targets at high volume, yes. The Web Unlocker, ZIP-code targeting, and dedicated account management save enough engineering time to offset the 3–4x premium over budget providers. For small teams doing standard scraping, the premium is harder to justify.

Can I use IPRoyal for large-scale scraping?

You can, but with caveats. The 32M IP pool is smaller than enterprise providers, success rates on protected targets lag behind Bright Data and Oxylabs, and there's no built-in unblocking. For large-scale scraping of moderately protected sites, IPRoyal works fine. For scraping highly protected targets at millions of requests per day, you'll likely need a larger provider.

The Verdict

IPRoyal is the better choice for most independent developers and small teams. The pricing is unbeatable, the non-expiring traffic model is genuinely user-friendly, and the proxy quality is solid for standard scraping tasks.

Bright Data is the better choice for enterprise operations where failure costs more than the proxy bill. The larger network, built-in unblocking, and compliance infrastructure justify the 3–4x price premium when your data pipeline can't afford downtime.

The worst decision? Paying for Bright Data's enterprise features when you only need clean rotating IPs. Or choosing IPRoyal's budget pricing when you're targeting sites that'll eat your success rate alive without proper unblocking.

Match the tool to the job.