The Bright Data alternative for teams that want to start small

Bright Data is not a proxy shop in the sense most of this series covers. Its catalogue is residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies, plus unlocker, SERP, browser and scraper APIs, datasets and data feeds. The proxy network is one product line inside a data company, and the company sells to buyers who want the whole stack.

The residential network is the headline: 400M+ monthly residential IPs in 195 countries. It describes its sourcing as an opt-in SDK model, where app users join voluntarily in exchange for an ad-free or upgraded app and can opt out at any time, which is more than most providers publish.

ResiFactory is narrower. We sell rotating residential and mobile bandwidth by the gigabyte, static ISP proxies, and Mac servers by the day or the month. There is no scraping API and no sales team between you and a proxy line.

That difference in shape is the whole comparison. If you want one vendor for proxies, unblocking and data, Bright Data is built for you. If you want proxies and nothing else, at a price printed on the page, keep going.

Bright Data's residential list price is $8 per gigabyte on pay-as-you-go. On the day we checked, the page was also advertising 50% off for the first 3 months with a promotional code, which takes pay-as-you-go to $4 per gigabyte. Past the promotion, the lower rates sit on monthly plans at $499, $999 and $1,999, with a custom per-gigabyte price past 1 TB.

Our rates are $1.50/GB for Essential and $3.00/GB for Premium. There is no code to enter and no plan ladder to climb; the first gigabyte costs what the thousandth does.

To be fair to them, the promotion is real money off, and new accounts get a first deposit matched dollar for dollar, up to $500. If you will spend at plan level every month for a year, run the sums for your own volume.

For a buyer who wants to start with a small top-up, the list rate is the number that matters, and ours is the lower of the two. See pricing for the full sheet.

Bright Data offers a pay-as-you-go plan with no commitment on every proxy type, so you can buy without a contract. The cheaper residential rates, though, come with a monthly commitment charged on the 1st, which does not roll over when usage falls short of it. In a quiet month, the part of a commitment you did not use is simply spent.

That model suits a business with steady, forecastable volume, and for a team that already budgets proxy spend by the month it is easy to live with.

Ours is a prepaid wallet per pool. Load any amount from $0.50, spend it at your own pace, and it does not expire, which matters most when your usage comes in bursts.

At the top end, Bright Data offers custom pricing and a premium SLA of 99.99% network uptime for buyers past 1 TB. We do not sell a contract with an uptime SLA, and if your buyer needs one on paper, that is a point in their column.

Bright Data asks for a compliance review before residential or mobile use, which may include a short video call and a check of company or personal details. Proxyway's review describes a limited mode before full verification, and a wait of up to three business days for full access. The process is there to keep its peer network clean, and it is one reason the compliance story holds together.

It does mean the first day looks different: a small team can find itself explaining the project before it has sent a request.

With us, you sign in, top up and generate a line, under the acceptable use policy. To test before you pay, we offer 1 GB of Premium free when a new account links Google. Bright Data offers a free trial, with trial traffic shown in the dashboard but not billed; once you have cleared its review, that is the cleaner start.

Bright Data's mobile network is listed as one of its four IP networks, with no mobile tab or price on its proxy pricing page. The product exists, and its FAQ describes rotating connections on carrier networks. What we could not find on its pricing pages was a rate.

We publish ours. Mobile is $3.00/GB, on real phones attached to carrier networks in 150 countries, with US state and city targeting in the username. It is the same prepaid wallet as every other pool, with no plan to size and no quote to wait for.

If you are budgeting a mobile project, a printed rate is the thing to compare. See mobile proxies for ours.

Bright Data runs a shared and dedicated pool of 1.3M+ static residential IPs, with country-level targeting. It sells shared static IPs from 10 IPs at $1.80 each, $18 a month, or dedicated static IPs from 10 IPs at $3.50 each, $35 a month, with a sales quote past 1,000 IPs. Each address comes with a fair-usage allowance of 100 GB per IP per month.

For a small number of addresses that is cheaper than anything we sell, and we will say so plainly: our smallest ISP purchase is 50 single IPs. If a short list of addresses is all you need, buy them there.

A subnet is a different unit. A /24 is $255 a month, billed monthly, and each one goes to exactly one customer: a contiguous block whose reputation is yours alone.

One detail from their FAQ is worth knowing before you build on static addresses there: IPs allocated to an account are not kept if the account is suspended. Ours are sold in restock windows, members first and then everyone, and the next window is shown on the ISP page of your dashboard. See ISP proxies for how a restock works.

Bright Data includes free country, city, ZIP code and ASN targeting on residential, and supports HTTP/S and SOCKS5 on residential. That is a full feature set, and ZIP code is a level we do not offer.

Every ResiFactory pool takes a country, a US state and a network (ASN) in the username. Premium and Mobile add city. HTTP runs on port 7777 on every pool, and SOCKS5 on port 1080 on Premium, Mobile and ISP.

A sticky session on Premium and Mobile holds for up to 24 hours (120 minutes on Essential), and the rule is published on every page that mentions it. See residential proxies for the syntax.

On paperwork, Bright Data is ahead: it publishes SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports, ISO 27701, a Cloud Security Alliance listing and a PwC assurance report on its compliance controls, and its account takes PayPal, Payoneer, Alipay, Google Pay, wire transfer and cards, or the AWS Marketplace. We publish what we can prove on our trust page, and it is a shorter list.

Bright Data is bigger than we are, sells far more than we do, and has the paperwork to prove its process. If you need ZIP targeting, datacenter IPs, scraping APIs, an uptime SLA or an enterprise audit, buy from them.

If you want proxies and nothing else, the case for us is short. A lower pay-as-you-go residential rate with no code and no plan, no monthly commitment that resets, a mobile rate printed on the page, and a whole subnet that belongs to one customer.

For a handful of static addresses, they are the cheaper buy. For a small team that wants to start today on a prepaid wallet, we think we are the better one.

Proxyway published a hands-on review of Bright Data, last updated in May 2026, including its account of the onboarding. It is worth reading in full.

Every ResiFactory price on this page is read live from our catalogue, and every Bright Data fact links to the page we read it on.