Bright Data

Bright Data wins the measurement that matters: it succeeded on difficult targets where cheaper providers did not. In our 10,000-request test it posted the highest success rate on every defended target, and once you calculate cost per successful request rather than per gigabyte, its premium narrows sharply — on the hardest target it was actually the cheapest.

The infrastructure justifies it. A pool in the tens of millions across residential, datacentre, ISP and mobile, city and ASN-level targeting, and managed scraping APIs that handle retries and rendering so you are not maintaining unblocking logic yourself. Its published compliance framework, KYC process and use-case review are also the most developed here, which matters increasingly for enterprise procurement and for anyone whose legal team asks where the IPs come from.

The friction is cost and complexity. Pricing is genuinely hard to model across products and tiers, entry commitments are higher than the mid-market, and the dashboard presents a great deal at once — reviewers consistently describe a steep first week. The KYC and use-case review also slow onboarding, which is a feature for compliance and an irritation if you want to start today.

Our guidance: the right choice for serious, sustained collection at scale where success rate and compliance documentation matter. For smaller projects on undefended targets it is more infrastructure and more money than the job requires.