Decodo vs SOAX: Mid-Tier Residential Proxy Networks Compared (2026)

Most of the head-to-head coverage of these two networks is filed under a company name that no longer exists. Decodo was Smartproxy until 2025, and the rename took its third-party evidence base with it, so a buyer searching under the current names finds surprisingly little. What is left is a pair of vendors that land on the same shortlist constantly: both sell residential proxies self-serve, both have a cheap or free entry point, neither requires a contract, and both sit one tier below Bright Data and Oxylabs on price and on sales friction.

Every vendor claim below was read from the vendor's own pages on 27 July 2026 and is quoted as the vendor states it. Proxy rate cards move quickly and pool numbers are self-reported, so treat all of it as a starting point for your own trial rather than a settled spec sheet.

Who each is for

Decodo is the broad self-serve account. One login covers residential, static residential and ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies, plus a Site Unblocker, a Web Scraping API, a search API and a free AI parser. It is the 2018-founded business formerly named Smartproxy, and its about page still introduces itself that way, claiming 100+ employees and 85K+ clients.

SOAX is narrower and more opinionated. Its about page says it was founded in 2020 by five co-founders, is incorporated and headquartered in the UK at an Uxbridge address in west London, and counts more than 10,000 customers with a team that grew past 60 people in 2025. The product line is residential, mobile and datacenter proxies plus a Web Data API and an edge-distributed browser runtime.

Both are proxy networks first and API vendors second. That ordering matters, because it sets what each is actually good at.

The naming problem, and why it costs you research time

Decodo's about page confirms the continuity in its own words: "Since 2018, Decodo (formerly known as Smartproxy) has been the go-to proxy and scraping solutions provider." What that page does not do is date the change. Our directory entry records it as April 2025 and describes the company, infrastructure and existing subscriptions as carrying over unchanged. We could not independently confirm that date from a primary announcement within this piece's research budget, so treat the year as reliable and the month as secondhand.

The practical effect is that almost every third-party review, block-rate test and forum thread describing this network is filed under a name the vendor no longer uses. When you find a Smartproxy benchmark, you are reading about the same pool under old pricing. Our guide to reading scraping benchmarks covers why that gap between test date and purchase date matters more in this market than in most.

SOAX has the opposite problem: it has kept one name, but its public numbers drift between its own pages.

Pool size claims, and how much to trust them

Nobody audits residential proxy pool counts. They are marketing figures, and both vendors publish more than one.

SOAX's residential page claims "155+ million residential proxies worldwide" across "195+ geos with city-level targeting." Its mobile page claims 33+ million IPs. Its about page describes an "ethically-sourced proxy pool" of "more than 191 million IPs," which reads as the combined figure.

Decodo's residential page claims "115M+ ethically-sourced IPs in 195+ locations worldwide," and breaks that down with country-level detail: 9.4M+ in India, 7.1M+ in the United States, 2.3M+ in Germany. Its Web Scraping API page, on the same site on the same day, says the API rotates "a pool of 125M+ addresses." Two numbers, one vendor, ten million apart. That is normal for this category and is a good reminder of what these figures are worth.

The country breakdown is the more useful disclosure. A headline pool number tells you nothing about whether the vendor has depth in the three countries you actually scrape. Decodo publishes per-country counts; SOAX publishes a location count. Neither substitutes for pulling a thousand IPs during a trial and checking the ASN spread yourself.

For the sourcing question underneath all of this, both use the phrase "ethically-sourced" and neither explains the consent mechanism on the pages read here. SOAX cites "robust KYC procedures" and an "exclusive pool of whitelisted IPs" without describing how residential participants opt in. Our guide to residential proxy IP sourcing covers the questions worth putting to both in writing, and the ongoing scrutiny of sourcing claims explains why procurement teams increasingly ask them.

Targeting granularity

Here the received wisdom does not survive contact with the vendor pages. SOAX has a reputation for precision targeting against a filtered pool. That reputation is not baseless: filtering is listed as a feature all the way down to its free Sandbox tier, and its targeting is genuinely granular. But as advertised on 27 July 2026, SOAX's residential page offers targeting by "country, region, city, or ASN," and its Sandbox feature list names country, region, city and ISP. There is no public claim of ZIP or postal code targeting, and no public claim of selecting a named mobile carrier on the mobile proxy page, which offers "region, city, or ASN" and discusses carrier-grade NAT without offering carrier selection.

Decodo's residential page advertises "Continent, country, state, city, ZIP code, and ASN-level targeting," and explicitly says the advanced levels including city, ZIP and ASN are included at no additional cost.

So on the published grids, Decodo claims one level finer than SOAX and does not charge extra for it. If ZIP-level targeting is a hard requirement, that is a real difference and it currently runs against Decodo's usual framing as the generalist. ASN targeting on both is the practical equivalent of ISP-level control, since an ASN maps to a network operator, which is what most teams mean when they ask for ISP targeting.

None of that settles which pool actually holds an IP in the ZIP you asked for. Advertised granularity and delivered granularity are different measurements, and only a trial against your own targets distinguishes them. Our guide to choosing a proxy type by target covers when this level of precision is worth paying for at all, which for a lot of workloads it is not.

Session control

Both offer per-request rotation and sticky sessions, and both describe them in similar terms. SOAX offers rotation on every request or "customizable sticky sessions that use the same entry point and an unchanging IP address," with a retainer time cited up to 60 minutes. Decodo offers IPs that "switch per request or on a timer" and sticky sessions that "keep the same residential IP for minutes to days," with HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 support and unlimited concurrent sessions.

On paper Decodo advertises the longer sticky ceiling. Whether a session survives that long on your target is a property of the target's anti-bot system and the specific IP, not of the vendor's documentation. If your workflow is a logged-in multi-step flow, session persistence is the thing to measure first and the thing most likely to differ between these two on any given site.

The API layer on top

Both wrap the network in a managed scraping product, and both target the same job: send a URL, get content back, do not build the rotating proxy and rendering machinery yourself.

Decodo's Web Scraping API advertises "100+ pre-built templates with per-request control" and returns HTML, JSON, CSV, PNG, XHR or Markdown, with Markdown described as optimized for LLM consumption. SOAX's Web Data API returns raw HTML, screenshots, Markdown, structured JSON and XHR responses, and claims "0.5s average response time and 99.9% guaranteed uptime."

That uptime and latency pair is a vendor claim on a marketing page, not a measured result, and we have not tested it. Treat it the way you would treat any self-published SLA-shaped number.

The meaningful difference is billing shape rather than capability. Decodo prices the scraping API separately from bandwidth on a per-1,000-requests ladder. SOAX folds its API into the same credit balance as its proxies. If you want the API and the proxies to draw from one budget, SOAX's model is simpler. If you want to see exactly what the API costs independent of proxy spend, Decodo's is clearer. Our guide to scraping API credit pricing walks through how to normalize the two into a single number, and web unblocker vs scraping API covers where Decodo's separate Site Unblocker product fits.

Pricing: two different shapes

Most evaluations get decided here, and the two rate cards are not the same kind of object.

Decodo, from decodo.com/pricing on 27 July 2026, is a flat per-GB ladder with no plan fee and no geographic differentiation:

Pay-as-you-go is $4.00 per GB through wallet credits. A 3-day, 100 MB free trial precedes plan activation. The Web Scraping API is billed separately, starting at a free plan of 2,000 requests at $0.50 per 1K on standard proxies, then $19, $49 and $99 per month tiers that drop the standard-proxy rate to $0.14 per 1K at the top. Premium proxies with JavaScript rendering are quoted up to $1.50 per 1K.

SOAX, from soax.com/pricing on the same day, charges a monthly plan fee and prices bandwidth by country tier:

Tier 1 covers developed markets including the US, UK, Japan and Australia. Tier 2 covers emerging markets including Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. Tier 3 covers 100+ developing countries. One credit equals one dollar, unused credits roll over for 60 days on monthly billing, and postpaid billing appears only at the Enterprise tier. The exact credit allowance bundled into each plan fee is stated in fine print that is easy to misread, so confirm the number at checkout rather than from a summary.

The 100 GB question

Take 100 GB a month of US traffic. Decodo's Enterprise tier is $275 plus VAT flat. SOAX's Builder plan at $3.00 per GB in Tier 1 puts that same 100 GB at $300 of credit consumption, and the next plan up costs more in base fee than the usage saves at that volume. Decodo is modestly cheaper at that specific point.

Invert the geography and the answer flips. 100 GB of Tier 3 traffic is $120 of usage on SOAX Builder, against Decodo's flat $275, though SOAX's $200 base fee sets a floor that eats most of the advantage until volume climbs. At several hundred GB of developing-market traffic on Scale or Enterprise, SOAX's $0.60 and $0.35 per GB rates are in a different price class than anything Decodo publishes.

The rule that falls out of this: Decodo's pricing rewards low volume and Tier 1 geographies and punishes nothing. SOAX's pricing rewards high volume and non-Western geographies and punishes idle months, because the plan fee is charged whether or not you scrape. A team with spiky, seasonal traffic will feel that. Our guide to proxy pricing models covers the wider set of billing shapes, and proxy pricing after per-GB covers where the whole category is drifting.

Head to head

What each is bad at

Decodo's weaknesses. The brand change orphaned most of its third-party evidence base, and the vendor's own pages disagree on pool size. Its rate card is geography-blind, so teams scraping mostly non-Western targets pay Tier 1 prices for Tier 3 traffic and will find SOAX cheaper at volume. The product surface is wide enough that support quality across all of it is a real question, and the free entry point is a 100 MB, 3-day trial rather than a standing free tier. The published $2.75 per GB floor is also not competitive with what the high-volume tiers at larger networks negotiate.

SOAX's weaknesses. The plan fee is the main one: $200 plus VAT before a single request, which prices out evaluation-stage and hobby workloads that Decodo takes for $11.25. Its credit mechanics require more reading than a flat per-GB rate, and the plan-included allowance is genuinely ambiguous on the pricing page. It offers no datacenter or ISP breadth comparable to Decodo's four-type spread, its published targeting grid stops at city and ASN, and its public disclosures are thinner overall. It is also the smaller and younger company of the two by its own numbers, which is a vendor-stability input for anyone signing an annual commitment.

Neither is in the same weight class as the enterprise networks on raw scale. If pool depth on hostile targets is the binding constraint, the honest comparison is Bright Data against Oxylabs rather than either of these. And if price alone is the constraint, Webshare undercuts both.

Running the evaluation

Do not decide this from rate cards. Both let you start cheaply, so run the same test twice.

Take your five hardest target domains. Push identical request volume through each network with identical headers and identical session settings. Measure success rate, time to first block, how long a sticky session actually survives, and whether the geo you requested is the geo you got. Then price the month you just simulated on both rate cards using your real country mix, not a US-only assumption.

If you expect to keep both, the multi-proxy vendor failover guide covers wiring two networks behind one crawler without doubling your fixed costs.

Who each is wrong for

Decodo is wrong for a team whose traffic is overwhelmingly non-Western and running at hundreds of GB a month. The flat rate that makes Decodo attractive at 10 GB becomes the expensive option once SOAX's Tier 3 pricing kicks in at Scale volumes. It is also wrong for anyone whose procurement process depends on a deep archive of independent third-party testing, because most of that archive is filed under a name the company retired.

SOAX is wrong for a team still deciding whether it needs proxies at all. A $200 monthly floor is a poor fit for evaluation, for intermittent projects and for anything seasonal, and the free Sandbox tier's $5.00 per GB rate is not a serious production price. It is also wrong for a team that wants ISP, static residential and datacenter IPs under the same account as its residential pool, because that breadth is Decodo's argument, not SOAX's.