Switching proxy providers is cheap to try and expensive to get wrong. The cheap part is a small paid test on your own target. The expensive part is choosing on a homepage. This page is about doing the first thing before the second.
The published numbers
Read from their own public pricing pages on 10 August 2026, and stated as advertised rather than as verified by us:
- Datacenter: from $0.60 per GB with no commitment, falling to $0.42 per GB on $1,999/month commitment (5 TB included).
- ISP: from $8 per GB with no commitment, falling to $5 per GB on $1,999/month commitment (399 GB included).
- Residential: from $8 per GB with no commitment, falling to $5 per GB on $1,999/month, 798GB included.
Every one of those is a published rate rather than a measured outcome. That is not a criticism of Bright Data: our own page is built from the same material. It is the reason the rest of this comparison is about what published rates leave out.
Bright Data in its own words
Their homepage title, read on 9 September 2026: "Bright Data: Web Data Infrastructure for Humans and Agents". Their own summary of the product runs: "World’s #1 web data infrastructure for humans and AI agents to search, crawl, extract and act across the public web. Trusted by 50,000+ organizations."
The rest of what the page puts in writing:
The product lines named on that page are residential, datacenter, ISP or static residential and a scraping or SERP API. They advertise 195 countries or locations. Payment methods mentioned: cards. The page offers some form of free trial. Support is advertised as around the clock.
That is the vendor speaking, not us. We print it because a claim with a date attached is at least falsifiable.
How long Bright Data has been trading
The domain was registered on 26 May 2002, through GoDaddy.com, LLC, which makes it about 24 years old. Checked against the registry on 23 April 2026. The Internet Archive holds 20 snapshots of the site, the earliest from June 2002. The registration currently runs to 26 May 2028.
This proves nothing about the product. It is a cheap check against the one failure mode that costs buyers real money in this market, which is paying a provider that will not exist in six months.
Corporate history we have recorded: Luminati renamed Bright Data (Mar 2021); EMK Capital bought ~75% in 2017; Majority stake held by EMK Capital since 2017; Spun out of Hola VPN as Luminati.
Their published surface
We crawled 7.476 pages of their site on 18 June 2026 and found 2.351 blog pages, 21 pricing pages, 344 location pages, 332 use-case pages and 71 integration pages.
The number is not a compliment or a criticism. It describes how much of their effort goes into being found, which is worth knowing when you are weighing a marketing claim against a measurement.
How recently the site moved
Our crawl of their site found 7,476 pages carrying a date, 2,351 of them articles. The oldest is from January 2022 and the newest from August 2026. 6,917 of them carry a date inside the last twelve months.
Read that as a liveness check rather than a review. It says the lights are on, and nothing about whether the proxies work on your target.
What buyers type into Google about them
Search volume around the name runs to 1,850 a month, split as 960 a month for an alternative to them, 720 a month for their pricing and 170 a month for a review of them. Figures read from Google Keyword Planner on 9 September 2026.
The biggest slice is people looking for a way out, so the useful thing to hand a reader is evidence rather than an opinion.
At up to $18.85 a click, these are expensive words. Worth remembering when a review ranks first and happens to recommend whoever pays the most.
What you still do not know after reading their site
Why the pool number is the least useful figure
Claims of ten million, one hundred million or more say nothing about whether your requests get through this week. Your job meets the handful of exits it draws, in your countries, against one target. Rotation policy and freshness move that outcome far more than the headline total.
What the starting rate leaves out
Divide what you spent in a month by what you actually used, and you have the only rate worth quoting. It usually sits well above the figure on the homepage, because tiers, minimums and unused allocation all sit between the two.
Concurrency limits decide throughput
A plan with generous traffic and a low thread limit is a slow plan. Find both numbers before you size anything, because the smaller of the two is your actual ceiling.
The two of us, on the questions that matter
Six questions, both answers, and an honest blank where we do not hold a current figure:
| Question to ask | Bright Data | HProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Published, see above, dated 10 August 2026 | From $0.44/GB, pay as you go |
| Does unused balance expire? | Not published clearly, ask before paying | Never |
| Minimum commitment | Lower rates require one, see above | None |
| Identity checks | Read their current terms | Card orders are screened, and verification is sometimes requested |
| Targeting | Check the current terms, this one moves | Country, city and ISP |
| Free way to evaluate | Their terms page answers this | Free proxy list and proxy checker |
Six rows is enough. Longer comparison tables in this market are usually padded with features nobody chooses on, which makes them look thorough and read as noise.
The test that beats this page
It is a small amount of money for an answer that is actually about your target.
- Take the smallest paid unit each provider will sell you. A free trial works for a first pass, though trials sometimes ride better pools than paid plans do.
- Fire the same batch through both on one afternoon. Different days are different conditions, and that ruins the comparison.
- Track the success rate and the bandwidth. A cheap gigabyte that fails half the time is not cheap.
- Run a sample of the addresses through an independent lookup, because advertised geography and actual geography differ more often than the market admits.
- Go with whichever performed, then measure again next quarter. Networks change underneath you.
The rest of the shortlist
Buyers comparing this name usually have two or three of these open in other tabs:
- 5Socks alternatives
- 711Proxy alternatives
- 89ip alternatives
- 911.re (911 S5) alternatives
- 911Proxy alternatives
- 9Proxy alternatives
Our own position
Residential starts at $0.44 per GB, the balance never expires, there is no minimum commitment and no sales call, and city and ISP targeting are included. We publish our free side openly, 129,131,311 verification checks and counting, because a network that is confident has no reason to fear measurement.
