Residential Proxies Trusted by Fortune 500 Companies
Grade: A — Score: 85/100
Bright Data's residential proxies are powered by an award-winning proxy network, providing access to over 400 million monthly residential IPs. With advanced technology, users can target specific countries, cities, ZIP codes, and more, ensuring precise data collection.
The workflow is seamless, allowing users to integrate with various tools and programming languages effortlessly. The infrastructure supports unlimited concurrent sessions, enabling efficient scraping without code modifications.
However, businesses must consider the risks associated with data collection. Bright Data emphasizes ethical sourcing and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensuring that users mitigate legal risks while collecting data responsibly.
Pay As You Go: $8/GB
141 GB Plan: $499/mo ($7/GB)
332 GB Plan: $999/mo ($6/GB)
798 GB Plan: $1999/mo ($5/GB)
Enterprise: Custom (contact sales)
Consider switching to Luminati: Similar offerings with a focus on ethical data collection.
IPs come from the Bright SDK peer network, where app users opt in to route traffic in exchange for ad-free or premium app features. Peers can opt out at any time and no personal data is collected from them. Bright Data publishes its sourcing practices, holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications, and maintains an acceptable use policy that rejects adult, gambling, and cryptocurrency use cases. The company was separated from Hola VPN in 2017 and rebranded from Luminati in 2021, though historical Hola ties still surface in some reviews.
Bright Data states KYC is typically resolved within 48 hours, though Proxyway and independent reviewers report up to three business days in practice, especially for freelancers who must also complete a video call. You can still run other Bright Data products (Unlocker API, Scrapers APIs, Datacenter Proxies) during the review. KYC information is stored in Bright Data's systems to speed up future reviews of the same account.
Yes, through Immediate Access mode. You can target any domain that permits crawling under its robots.txt file, provided you install Bright Data's SSL certificate and stick to GET requests. Immediate Access does not give you dedicated IPs or access to domains Bright Data marks restricted; for those you need Full Access, which requires completing KYC.
Shared proxies draw IPs from the general rotating pool, which is what all Pay As You Go customers use by default. Dedicated residential proxies give you exclusive access to a group of IPs with matching parameters (for example, a fixed set of US city IPs for long-running account management) and are only available after completing KYC. Shared is the right pick for general scraping; dedicated is for workflows that need consistent IPs for the same target.
Pick Residential for scraping sophisticated anti-bot targets (e-commerce, travel, social media) where appearing as a real consumer device matters. Datacenter Proxies are cheaper and faster but get blocked by Cloudflare, DataDome, and similar protections. ISP Proxies are datacenter-hosted IPs registered under ISPs, giving you static residential-looking addresses at a lower rate than rotating residential, which suits account management and sticky sessions rather than high-volume rotating work.
Oxylabs Residential PAYG starts at around $4 per GB compared to Bright Data's $8 per GB, so Oxylabs is cheaper at entry and small-to-mid volumes. Independent benchmarks put both providers above 99 percent success on common targets, with Oxylabs slightly faster on response time and Bright Data ahead on IP pool size at 400 million plus versus Oxylabs' 175 million. Compliance certifications (ISO 27001, SOC 2) are equivalent, so the main buying decision comes down to price, support responsiveness, and whether you need Bright Data's broader platform of scrapers and datasets alongside the proxies.
Decodo, previously known as Smartproxy, starts at around $2.20 per GB residential with no mandatory KYC for most use cases, making it roughly a quarter of Bright Data's $8 PAYG rate. Independent testing shows Decodo at 99.68 percent success and 0.54 second response times, competitive with Bright Data on reliability. The tradeoff is a smaller IP pool (65 million versus 400 million), no dedicated residential option at Bright Data's scale, and none of the enterprise compliance paperwork that procurement teams often require.
Bright Data's acceptable use policy explicitly rejects adult content, gambling, cryptocurrency trading, and sneaker bot use cases involving private data or account creation behind logins. Scraping that requires registering accounts on a target platform is also typically declined during KYC. If your use case falls in these categories, Bright Data will either deny KYC or terminate your account during ongoing compliance monitoring; IPRoyal or Decodo have more permissive policies in those spaces.
Bandwidth is the total of request headers, POST body data, response headers, and response data for every request routed through the proxy. This means image and JavaScript payloads from the target page count against your quota even if you only need the HTML text, which matters when scraping heavy pages. Traffic used during a free trial is visible on your dashboard but not billed, and you can set daily spend limits per zone in bytes or dollars to cap runaway costs.
No. If you stay in active status through a full month, your minimum commitment does not roll over regardless of how much you actually used. Usage and billing restart on the first of each month. This is a notable difference from IPRoyal, whose residential traffic is non-expiring, so committing to a $499, $999, or $1999 Bright Data tier only pays off if you will reliably use most of the included bandwidth each month.
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