Decodo vs Bright Data: Which is better in 2026?

Bright Data costs roughly twice as much per gigabyte and is sometimes cheaper per useful result. That paradox is the whole comparison. In our 10,000-request test Bright Data had the highest success rate on every defended target — on the hardest one it succeeded where Decodo dropped to a level that made retries and wasted bandwidth more expensive than the price difference. One of our reviewers switched away to save money and returned within six weeks after exactly that experience. Against that, on ordinary targets — public directories, undefended listings, most price monitoring — the two performed within a few points of each other, and Decodo costs half as much, signs you up in minutes with no KYC queue, and has a dashboard a small team can run without a solutions engineer. The decision rule is simple: run a paid trial of both against your targets and compare cost per successful request, not per gigabyte. Most teams will find Decodo wins that calculation; teams scraping heavily defended sites will find it does not.