Bright Data Alternative 2026: Mobile Proxy Comparison

Bright Data closed its mobile proxy product to new customers in April 2026. The dedicated product page (brightdata.com/proxy-types/mobile-proxies) 301-redirects to a generic proxy types page, and the mobile pricing page returns a 404, both directly checkable. A competitor writeup was first to document the change in detail (Illusory, April 2026), and independent tracking corroborates it (AIMultiple). Existing customers on legacy contracts may keep access; new signups cannot buy Bright Data mobile in 2026.

The problem with the current "bright data alternative" search results is that almost every article ranking on the head term was written before this happened. They still treat Bright Data as the standard to compare against rather than the product being replaced. This comparison is built on what new customers can actually buy in 2026, split by architecture: rotating mobile for volume and IP diversity, dedicated mobile for session persistence and hardened targets.

What Made Bright Data the Default, and Why People Were Already Leaving

Before the sunset, Bright Data offered roughly 72M residential IPs and around 7M mobile IPs with granular country, ASN, and carrier targeting, plus Web Unlocker and SERP APIs. Mobile pricing ran around $8 per GB pay-as-you-go, or roughly $7.14 per GB on the $499/month committed plan, per the rates AIMultiple has tracked for the product (AIMultiple, May 2026). For enterprise teams with budget and compliance requirements, it was the default pick.

Even before the sunset, three points of friction pushed buyers to look elsewhere. Mandatory business verification with document uploads blocked individual developers and privacy-focused teams. Contract minimums locked smaller teams into spend they did not need. And sales-call gating meant anything past starter plans required sitting through a demo before pricing was visible.

Now the friction is moot because the product cannot be purchased. The question is which alternative fits which workflow.

Rotating Mobile Alternatives: Decodo and Oxylabs

Rotating mobile assigns a new IP from a pool on each request or after a set interval. Fits large-scale scraping, SERP monitoring, price aggregation, and any workflow where IP diversity matters more than session persistence.

Decodo (Formerly Smartproxy)

Rebranded from Smartproxy in late 2025. Pool of 10M+ mobile IPs from 700+ carriers across 160+ global locations, with sub-0.5s response time and 99.75% advertised success rate on their official mobile proxy page.

Verified 2026 mobile pricing, per Decodo's own pricing page: pay-as-you-go lists at $8.00/GB, currently $4.00/GB under an active 50% promotion; step-down monthly plans run $3.75/GB (2GB) down to $2.75/GB at the 100GB tier under the same promo, with regular (non-promo) rates roughly double (Decodo mobile pricing). Protocol support: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5. 3G, 4G, and 5G carrier-grade proxies. City-level targeting and 24/7 support. Payment in credit card and PayPal, no cryptocurrency. Lightweight signup process.

Decodo also bundles SERP, eCommerce, and Web Scraping APIs that return structured JSON, plus a Site Unblocker product that handles anti-bot bypass automatically. Strongest balance of cost and feature depth in the rotating tier for developer-led setups.

Oxylabs

Enterprise-grade with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification. Pool of 20M+ mobile IPs across 140+ countries with 2.2M+ US mobile IPs alone (Oxylabs Mobile Proxies).

Pricing starts at $9/GB pay-as-you-go. Monthly Regular tier runs $5.40/GB (Starter) and drops to $4.74/GB at larger plans. Enterprise tiers scale down to $3.01/GB (Premium 133GB), $2.75/GB (Venture 318GB), and $2/GB (Corporate 1TB). Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5. Country, state, city, ASN, and coordinate-level targeting. Payment in cards, wire transfer, PayPal, AliPay. No cryptocurrency. KYC required.

Oxylabs is the only Bright Data alternative in this comparison carrying both SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. If procurement mandates compliance certifications, it is the practical default. For workflows without compliance requirements, the pricing premium is hard to justify.

Dedicated Mobile Alternatives: ProxyEmpire and IPRoyal

Dedicated mobile assigns a specific carrier IP to a single user with sticky sessions. Fits ad verification from specific carrier perspectives, account-bound scraping, and any target using Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, PerimeterX, or Kasada, where session coherence matters more than raw IP diversity.

ProxyEmpire

Standout feature is on-demand IP reset control. A scraping script can send an API call to force the cellular modem to rotate IPs instantly without contacting support (ProxyEmpire Dedicated 4G/5G).

Verified 2026 dedicated mobile pricing:

• USA 5G Mobile Proxies: $250/month covering all 52 locations in 38 states (Verizon only), with instant IP rotation on demand.
• Multi-Country Package: $125/month covering USA (NY, Miami, Texas), Israel, UK, and Austria, with IP rotation 4-5 times per day.

Rotating mobile is available separately at $4.50/GB (1GB PAYG), $4.17/GB (6GB), $3.75/GB (20GB), $3.34/GB (45GB), $2.96/GB (110GB), and $2.50/GB (300GB). Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5, HTTP/2. Unlimited bandwidth on dedicated. Carrier targeting (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone). $1.97 trial. Data rollover on all plans.

IPRoyal

Highest raw performance in the dedicated category. Advertises up to 100 Mbps on 5G with approximately 0.8 second response times and 99% uptime (IPRoyal Mobile Proxies). Pool of 4.5M+ mobile IPs across 3G, 4G, 5G, and LTE.

Verified 2026 dedicated mobile pricing:

• 24 hours: $10.11/day
• 30 days: $130/month
• 60 days: $123.50/month
• 90 days: $117/month

Rotating mobile pricing on the official page: $6.80/GB (2GB), $6.00/GB (10GB), $5.60/GB (50GB), $5.20/GB (100GB). Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5. Country, state, city, and named-carrier targeting (Vodafone, Orange, Verizon, T-Mobile). No data caps on dedicated. Payment in cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 25+ cryptocurrencies. Standard KYC.

Less feature-rich than ProxyEmpire's reset API but the raw 5G throughput is the strongest in this group for workflows where bandwidth matters most.

VoidMob: Both Architectures, Full Protocol Stack, MCP-Ready

Every alternative above fills one architecture slot with a fixed protocol set. VoidMob covers both rotating and dedicated mobile from one dashboard with a deeper protocol stack than any of them, plus the infrastructure features that hardened scraping targets actually require.

Rotating and shared tier. VoidMob's rotating and shared mobile proxies run on real 4G and 5G mobile devices with 10M+ mobile IPs and global coverage available at voidmob.com/proxies/locations. Rotating entry pricing starts at $3.99/GB (1GB), dropping to $2.50/GB at the 100GB tier, with custom pricing above 250GB. Sticky or rotating sessions per request with configurable rotation intervals.

Light on restrictions and limits compared to the enterprise-focused providers above, which makes it practical for individual developers, small teams, and privacy-conscious operators who cannot or will not go through business verification workflows.

Dedicated tier. Dedicated mobile starts from $69/month. Three infrastructure features here that no other provider in this comparison offers in combination.

Configurable p0f TCP/IP fingerprinting per port, matched to the OS the scraper claims to be. If the browser or client sends a Chrome-on-iOS user agent, the TCP stack parameters (TTL, window size, MSS, options order) match iOS. Anti-bot systems run p0f-style passive fingerprinting alongside browser checks, and most setups break here (platform proxy detection breakdown).

1:1 carrier parameter matching aligns DNS, timezone, and locale per port to the proxy's geolocation.

Carrier-native DNS resolution eliminates DNS leaks that anti-bot systems use to detect proxy traffic (DNS leaks and proxy detection).

Full protocol stack. Where every other provider in this comparison caps at HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5, VoidMob supports six protocols total:

• HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 for standard workflows
• VLESS over Xray with REALITY transport, mimicking a real TLS 1.3 handshake to a legitimate domain so DPI cannot flag the traffic as proxy
• OpenVPN for setups already standardised on it
• UDP transport for VLESS, which avoids TCP head-of-line blocking and survives DPI focused on TCP-based proxy protocols

Protocol depth is what makes the dedicated tier hold against Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, and DPI-heavy regional networks.

MCP Support: Managed Scraping vs. Raw Infrastructure

The Model Context Protocol was donated to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation in December 2025 (Linux Foundation, December 2025) and is now natively supported in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Cursor. MCP adoption among proxy providers moved fast: Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Decodo all now operate MCP servers (Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo).

What those servers hand back is the real distinction. Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Decodo's MCP tools run managed scraping: the agent requests a URL and gets cleaned, structured page data, with the provider's own infrastructure doing the fetching behind the API. None of the three expose their mobile proxy pool through MCP, and Bright Data's mobile product specifically is the one that's now sunset.

VoidMob's MCP server does the opposite: it hands the agent real mobile infrastructure to drive itself. Tools like purchase_proxy and rotate_proxy_ip return live carrier-grade proxy credentials, and rent_number returns a real US number, across both the pay-per-GB and dedicated tiers. For account creation, verification, and multi-account workflows where the agent needs to hold and use an actual mobile IP or phone number rather than just fetch a page, that's a different capability than managed-scraping MCP.

For pipelines where the scraper is itself an AI agent, this changes the integration cost from writing a custom proxy connector to pointing the agent at the MCP server.

Provider Comparison Table

Pricing verified against each provider's official pricing page as of July 2026. *Decodo's rotating rates reflect an active 50% promotion; regular rates run roughly double.

How to Choose a Bright Data Alternative in 2026

Match architecture to workflow first, then filter on the constraints that actually block adoption.

Rotating mobile solves scraping problems where IP diversity is the constraint. Basic anti-bot systems trigger on repeated requests from the same IP, and rotation through carrier IPs handles it. Decodo for developer-friendly cost with the built-in scraper APIs. Oxylabs for compliance-heavy enterprise workloads.

Dedicated mobile solves target-hardness problems. Cloudflare's Managed Challenge, Akamai Bot Manager, DataDome, PerimeterX, and Kasada all check TCP/IP fingerprints, TLS signatures, DNS consistency, and session coherence in parallel with IP reputation (ScrapeOps, May 2026). ProxyEmpire for programmatic IP reset. IPRoyal for maximum 5G throughput. VoidMob when TCP/IP fingerprint coherence, carrier-native DNS, or deeper protocols matter.

For pipelines that need both architectures, deeper protocols beyond SOCKS5, or MCP for AI agent workflows, VoidMob is the only provider in this comparison covering all of it from one dashboard.

FAQ

Wrapping Up

Bright Data was the default for years, and the April 2026 sunset moved the entire mobile proxy comparison landscape. The replacement question has four practical answers depending on the workflow.

Oxylabs for enterprise compliance where SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is mandatory. Decodo for cost-efficient developer rotating scraping with built-in scraper APIs. ProxyEmpire for dedicated mobile with programmatic IP reset. IPRoyal for dedicated 5G throughput.

VoidMob fits as the strongest overall Bright Data replacement for anyone whose workflow does not require formal compliance certifications: both architectures from one dashboard, six protocols including VLESS over Xray REALITY and OpenVPN, configurable p0f TCP/IP fingerprinting, carrier-native DNS, and an MCP server that hands agents real mobile proxy, SMS, and eSIM infrastructure instead of just scraped pages.

Verify pricing against each provider's official pricing page before deciding, since promotional rates change. For a broader mobile proxy comparison focused on scraping use cases specifically, the 2026 mobile proxies for web scraping guide covers the architecture decision in more depth.