Decodo: Proxy network, scraping APIs, and AI data automation at scale

In April 2025, Smartproxy, which initially launched as a proxy service provider, changed its name to Decodo. This rebrand signified the company’s transition into a full-fledged web data collection platform. 

From purpose-built scraping APIs that fit into machine learning (ML) pipelines to AI-powered parsing solutions, Decodo expanded its proxy foundation to help teams collect public data at scale. But how well does it meet the growing needs of modern AI web data projects? 

In this review, we explore:

• Decodo’s core infrastructure and technical features
• Its strengths and shortcomings
• Practical use cases of its solutions 
• How it compares to other alternatives like Bright Data, SOAX and its sister company, Oxylabs. 

If you’re training AI systems that depend on real-time web data or growing your data infrastructure, this Decodo review will help you decide whether its proxy and scraping solutions align with your needs. 

Decodo features and capabilities

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) home page

Decodo is a web data collection platform designed for extracting and processing public data reliably and at scale. Whether you are:

• Routing traffic through global IPs using residential, mobile, ISP or datacenter proxies
• Managing session behavior with sticky or rotating session types
• Extracting structured data for AI systems via the Web Scraping API
• Using prebuilt scraping templates for e-commerce, search engines, social media platforms and AI tools
• Handling dynamic websites with Site Unblocker
• Turning raw HTML into clean JSON with an AI Parser
• Managing proxies from your browser through Chrome or Firefox extensions
• Running multiple browser identities using X Browser

Each of Decodo’s features and tools examined below addresses common challenges in AI web data extraction, from handling CAPTCHAs to structuring information for AI pipelines.

1. Proxies: Residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter 

Decodo uses endpoints and ports to automatically route your traffic through a random IP address from their proxy pool. You can maintain this random state or select your preferred ZIP code, city, state, country or continent, depending on the proxy type. 

Users can authenticate connections for all proxies using either the username:password or IP whitelisting (IPv4 format only) method, with support for HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols. Decodo proxies also allow requests in cURL, Python, Java, Node, Go and PHP. 

Here’s a closer look at Decodo’s proxy network for geographic flexibility: 

• Residential proxies: Decodo’s residential proxies provide access to region-specific websites using a peer-to-peer network. For customizable proxy access, Decodo offers a configurable backconnect endpoint, which accepts the geo-targeting parameters (zip code, city, state, country or continent) in a string alongside your username. There aren’t fixed restrictions on how many threads (parallel connections) you can run concurrently when using the residential proxies, which is useful for scraping tasks where high throughput is important. 

• Mobile proxies: You can target a specific mobile carrier (700+ options available) using the asn parameter. The Mobile endpoint has session length options of 1, 10, 30 and 60 minutes, which you can manually extend for up to 24 hours.

• Static residential proxies: The ISP proxies provide dedicated and shared connections across 13+ countries that remain static until you change them or the session ends. These static proxies are suitable for traffic-intensive or dynamic websites that require a consistent identity. 

• Datacenter proxies: Decodo offers shared and dedicated datacenter proxies with country-level (18+ countries) targeting. You can only select a location when using the user:pass authentication method. Otherwise, you will get a random location with a whitelisted IP. 

Decodo’s proxy pool forms the foundation of its data access layer, but the true value lies in how you control those connections.

2. Session control

Decodo has two types of sessions to manage your IP address, depending on whether you are performing long-running data extraction tasks or gathering data from multiple sources: 

• Sticky session: When you need to maintain a stateful connection for multi-step scraping tasks, sticky session ensures your IP address persists until the session expires, the connecting device goes offline or you rotate the address prematurely. By default, a sticky session lasts for 10 minutes, but you can increase the session’s length by appending an integer value between 1 and 1440 (time calculated in minutes) to the sessionduration parameter. Decodo also allows you to run multiple concurrent sessions by adding session values (any alphanumeric text or string) to your proxy username.  

• Rotating session: This is the default state for the residential and mobile proxies. Rotating sessions distribute requests across multiple IP addresses, which is essential for data automation and scraping at scale. The proxy endpoint will assign a new IP address on every connection request, whether you’re loading the same page or visiting a different one. 

Sticky and rotating sessions manage how connections behave, and the Web Scraping API builds on that to automate data collection pipelines.  

3. Web Scraping API with headless browser and batch support

Decodo’s Web Scraping API integrates with its proxy network to handle CAPTCHAs, uses Chromium-based headless browser simulation to access JavaScript-rendered websites and returns AI-ready data in HTML, JSON, CSV or Markdown formats. 

The API supports synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (batch) requests, allowing users to submit up to 3000 URLs or queries in a single batch request. To receive task status for scheduled requests, you need to pass a callback_url parameter with the async endpoint. 

Including the locale parameter lets you make requests to a specific geographic location or language. Web Scraping API is useful for feeding real-time decision systems or collecting web-based training data for ML models.

4. Scraping templates

Decodo’s Target Templates

When you need more specific and up-to-the-minute data, Decodo provides Target Templates for e-commerce marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart and Target), social networks (YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok), search engines (Google and Bing) and AI-powered conversational tools (Perplexity and ChatGPT) as shown above. 

These templates are part of the Web Scraping API Advanced plan, with optimized parameters for the target sites, prebuilt parsers for more usable data and a Bulk feature for scraping multiple sites simultaneously. Decodo allows you to configure the templates to parse HTML output into Markdown or use a specific device type or retrieve results from a specific page via the markdown, device_type and page_from parameters, respectively. 

You can schedule future scrapes into your LLM training pipeline to run hourly, weekly, monthly or custom cron in UTC. Decodo can also deliver the scraped data through email, webhook or Google Drive.

5. Site Unblocker 

Site Unblocker is Decodo’s proxy-like solution that scrapes websites using predefined headers, cookie combinations and JavaScript rendering. To get localized content for AI models, you can specify a radius and coordinates, city, state and country, depending on your target URL. 

Site Unblocker automatically turns HTML output into LLM-ready Markdown if you’re on the Web Advanced and Site Unblocker plans. When you want to modify the response from a specific website, Site Unblocker lets you pass a payload with your request using the POST HTTP method.

6. Browser extensions

Decodo offers Chrome and Firefox extensions for proxy management. These extensions integrate Decodo’s available proxy types into your browser and are compatible with other proxy providers. You can add external proxy servers manually by entering the proxy address or domain, port number, authentication method and protocol (supports HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5). If you want to reuse this information for future scraping, you can save it as a profile, with no restrictions on how many profiles you can create. 

7. Browser fingerprinting

Decodo’s X Browser is a free tool that uses Chromedrive to manage your browser profiles for improved digital security and better access to location-specific content. When you install the tool on your operating system (currently supports Windows 10 and macOS operating systems), X Browser will distribute connection requests across multiple IP addresses, allowing you to associate each browser profile with a unique fingerprint. 

8. AI parser for HTML-to-JSON conversion (beta)

Decodo AI Parser

This tool (still in beta) takes raw HTML and transforms it into JSON-formatted data that you can plug directly into ML models, using natural language prompts. It requires you to enter a publicly available URL and describe the target content (for example, extract all product reviews) in plain English. The AI parser will output structured data along with auto-generated parsing instructions that you can integrate into your AI training workflow for future use. 

With its proxy setup, scraping APIs and AI-friendly parsing tools, Decodo lays the infrastructure for scalable web data extraction into AI systems. Below is an overview of what Decodo does well and where it might fall short.

Pros and cons of Decodo

Decodo offers many web scraping tools and proxy solutions, but it comes with both advantages and tradeoffs. Here’s a breakdown of where it delivers the most value and some limitations to consider:

Pros

• Decodo provides 100+ ready-made scraping templates for e-commerce, social media and search engines, so you can automate web data flow into AI pipelines. 
• Its Chrome and Firefox extensions let you set up and use proxies directly within your browsers.
• Decodo integrates with many third-party tools, including proxy managers (like Incogniton and AdsPower), no-code scrapers (like Octoparse and Parsehub), automation tools (like Zapier, n8n) and social media tools (PVACreator, Stackposts). It is also compatible with Selenium. 
• Decodo offers a model context protocol (MCP) server that can be integrated with tools like Cursor, VS Code and Claude Desktop, providing direct access to web content for AI agents. The MCP server also has built-in error handling and request management. 
• Decodo supports high concurrency with no artificial request caps, enabling sustained large-scale scraping. 
• Enterprises can request single sign-on (SSO) to reduce login to one set of credentials for improved security. 

Cons

• Decodo does not guarantee IP availability when using its backconnect endpoint, especially when you’re targeting smaller countries or cities.
• The dedicated datacenter proxies are limited to US locations, with no city-specific configuration option. 
• While the asn parameter lets you target IPs from a specific carrier, the tradeoff is that you cannot target a city simultaneously. 
• Decodo only provides ZIP codes for proxies in the USA. 
• You can only get HTML, JSON and CSV data outputs from the Web Scraping API when you’re on an Advanced plan. Otherwise, you get only HTML outputs.
• The KYC verification process can be lengthy and complicated. 
• Payments made with cryptocurrency are non-refundable. 
• While Decodo provides refund options, the conditions and procedures can be unclear. 

Despite these drawbacks, Decodo’s overall feature set still makes it a strong option for data-driven AI projects. Let’s look at how its capabilities can be applied in practical use cases.

Decodo use cases for AI teams and businesses

Decodo’s data gathering solutions can be used across a variety of use cases, from feeding data-hungry AI training pipelines to SEO monitoring. We highlight some of them below: 

1. AI data extraction

AI systems such as LLMs rely on large volumes of web data for training, validation, fine-tuning and producing more accurate results. Decodo is suited for collecting this data at scale using its Web Scraper API and proxy network. The API outputs AI-friendly data in JSON and Markdown formats which can serve the data ingestion stage of a training pipeline. 

For multimodal datasets, Decodo’s YouTube Scraping API works with yt-dlp command line tool to collect audio and video data. You can schedule data inflow into your ML pipeline using the synchronous requests option to continuously feed your AI systems with video data. 

2. Market research 

Decodo supports teams collecting product descriptions, customer reviews, pricing information or industry trend data by providing e-commerce scraping APIs for sites like Amazon, Target and Walmart. The APIs can return parsed outputs with fields such as product titles and pricing, which can be fed into AI models for tasks like price prediction or trend analysis. 

3. SEO monitoring 

Decodo’s Google and Bing Scraping APIs allow you to track keyword performance, perform site audits, analyze competitors’ search engine rankings and uncover insights into search behaviors. These APIs can return either the raw HTML of the SERP or structured, parsed results depending on your Decodo plan and query parameters. 

Decodo residential proxies also integrate with SEO tools such as Screaming Frog and SENukeTNG, enabling you to crawl websites and improve your SEO efforts. 

With Decodo, teams can extract large volumes of AI-ready data, plug into existing AI training pipelines with flexible integration options and automate data inflow into LLMs for real-time insights. But how does Decodo perform when compared against its alternatives? 

How Decodo compares to other web data platforms

Here’s a side-by-side evaluation of Decodo along with other data scraping and proxy providers on the market. 

Features or tools	Decodo	Bright Data	Oxylabs	SOAX	NetNut
Residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Concurrent sessions	Yes (unlimited)	Yes  (unlimited)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Browser extensions	Yes (Chrome and Firefox)	Yes	Yes (only Chrome)	No	No
Browser fingerprinting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Headless browser simulation	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
JS rendering	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Web scraping APIs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Prebuilt scraping templates	Yes  (100+)	Yes (covers 100+ domains)	Yes (30+)	No	No
AI parser	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
MCP server	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Best use cases	Training data for AI agents, business-focused data collection	Enterprise-grade data extraction	Large-scale web scraping, brand protection	Price monitoring, ad verification	Market research, SERP monitoring

NetNut and SOAX have lighter scraping solutions, while Oxylabs and Bright Data provide scraping APIs, IP pool and parsing tools similar to Decodo’s offerings. Decodo offers a Web Scraping API that’s designed for scalability, precision and efficiency. This API inherits Decodo’s proxy network, provides tailored scraping templates and has prebuilt parsers to meet the data relevance, diversity and size that AI projects need to scale. Still, whether Decodo is a good pick depends on your long-term data needs. 

What’s next?

Decodo’s combines a proxy network, scraping APIs, prebuilt templates and parsing tools in one platform. For AI and data engineering teams, this setup can reduce coordination between multiple tools, which can be useful when pulling different data types into ML pipelines. If your workflow requires high-volume extraction and flexibility to integrate with a MCP server and other automation or third-party tools, Decodo is compatible with many options. Before committing to the platform, you can try out its Playground environment to assess whether it meets your project’s goals.