SerpApi is an API that allows you to access search engine results programmatically without building your own SERP scraping infrastructure. It handles the process of sending search requests and returning structured results, which makes it useful for applications that need to collect search data at scale.
Decodo is the current name of Smartproxy, so those names do not represent two providers. The company completed the rebrand in April 2025, while existing accounts, subscriptions, and proxy configurations continued under the new brand. This guide compares eight current alternatives to Decodo's rotating residential product.
Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, does not have one universal price. It sells rotating proxy traffic, shared and dedicated IP allocations, managed access, and scraping APIs. The number on the homepage only makes sense after you identify the product, billing unit, allowance, and commitment behind it.
Slow proxy traffic usually comes from routing, connection setup, destination responses, content transfer, or client load. Measure Domain Name System (DNS), connection, first-byte, and transfer timings while changing one variable at a time. Reuse suitable connections, remove unnecessary assets, and test lower concurrency before replacing the proxy.
Residential proxies with Puppeteer let you run browser automation through residential IP addresses instead of your own IP or a data center address. You can configure them in Puppeteer using the --proxy-server argument and page.authenticate(), then verify the connection with an IP-checking endpoint. Proxidize lets you connect residential proxies to Puppeteer and use features such as IP rotation, sticky sessions, and location targeting.
A proxy pool is a collection of proxy routes from which an application or managed gateway selects a route. Good management assigns suitable exits, preserves sticky sessions, monitors valid results, quarantines weak routes, and limits retries. Use a managed gateway for simpler operations, or maintain endpoints directly when route-level control matters.
AI teams use proxies to route public-web collection through suitable IP types, locations, and sessions. The proxy is only the network layer: it does not discover sources, grant permission to collect them, clean HTML, remove duplicates, preserve provenance, or turn pages into training-ready records.
An Internet Protocol (IP) address used by a proxy is clean when evidence shows low known abuse risk. Its network classification and geolocation should support the provider's claims. Cleanliness does not guarantee website acceptance, so test representative requests and validate returned content on the intended target.
Oxylabs does not have one universal price. It sells raw proxy access, fixed proxy allocations, managed web access, a scraping API, hosted browser infrastructure, AI extraction tools, and datasets. Each product uses a different billing model.
Raw proxies and scraping APIs can both help a team collect public web data, but they are different purchases. A raw proxy supplies the network route. Your team still operates the HTTP client or browser, retry policy, extraction, validation, scheduling, and storage. A scraping API accepts a URL or collection task and manages some combination of routing, retries, rendering, extraction, and delivery.
The best proxy provider for Playwright or Puppeteer depends on the browser job. A small team validating its worker architecture needs a different product from an enterprise running localized browser tests, while a multi-page workflow may care more about Sticky-session behavior than the lowest price per gigabyte.