Lowest published price per GB for Residential Proxies, from each provider's own pricing page on 5 August 2026. Shifter's rate is the promotional price applied at checkout, Decodo's is the rate shown on its residential pricing page.
Shifter’s cheapest published rate is $0.75 per GB. Decodo’s is $2.75. That holds at every volume in between: $10 against $11.25 at the entry plan, $50 against $150 at 50 GB, $100 against $275 at 100 GB. It is a fraction of the price for traffic that, as the rest of this article shows, returned more unique IPs than Decodo’s in four of five countries and answered faster in all five.
Price is easy to check. Pool size is not, and that is the number everyone advertises and nobody proves.
Every residential proxy provider publishes a pool size. Almost none of them publish how many of those IPs are actually reachable in the country you need, at the moment you need them. A network advertised at 100 million addresses is not useful if only a few thousand are live in Germany when your crawler runs.
So we measured it. We sent 560,000 requests through Shifter and the same number through Decodo, across five countries, and counted how many distinct exit IPs each network handed back. Same machine, same target, same settings, one provider at a time.
Unique exit IPs returned per country. Shifter measured 7 October 2026, Decodo 5 August 2026. Sample size differs per country, so bars are comparable between the two providers within a country, not across countries.
The short version: Shifter returned more unique IPs in four of the five countries, by margins between 28.0% and 52.8%, and led on network spread, measured as distinct ASNs, in four of the five. Decodo returned more unique IPs only in Germany, by 5.1%. On a 100 GB plan Decodo’s traffic costs 2.75 times as much per GB.
How we measured this
The method is deliberately simple, so anyone can repeat it.
For each provider and each country, we opened a fresh connection per request through the provider’s rotating residential gateway and asked an IP echo service which address the request came from. A new connection each time means the gateway assigns a new exit IP each time. We ran one provider at a time, from a single server, with identical request counts, concurrency of 1,000 and a 10 second timeout, and we recorded every distinct IP that came back along with its country, region, city, ISP and ASN. Shifter’s figures were re-measured on 7 October 2026 with the identical method; Decodo’s are from its original run on 5 August 2026.
Sample sizes were set to roughly twice the number of IPs we expected each country to hold, so each test had a real chance of enumerating the pool rather than skimming it: 250,000 requests for the United States, 100,000 for the United Kingdom, 80,000 for France, 70,000 for Canada and 60,000 for Germany. That is 560,000 requests per provider, 1.12 million in total.
Three honest caveats. This is a point-in-time snapshot, and residential pools change hour by hour. The unique count is a lower bound, not a census: it is what the gateway actually served us during the test, so the real pool is larger than the number shown. And outside the United States the samples were large enough relative to the pools that both providers were close to fully enumerated, which makes those four countries the more reliable comparisons.
Results by country
| Metric | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 250,000 | 250,000 |
| Unique exit IPs | 212,212 | 138,914 |
| Unique ASNs | 1,828 | 1,578 |
| Unique cities | 5,805 | 6,010 |
| Success rate | 100% | 99.7% |
| Geo accuracy | 99.9% | 99.8% |
| Average response | 427 ms | 536 ms |
| 95th percentile | 1,268 ms | 2,531 ms |
Shifter found 52.8% more IPs, reached more distinct networks and returned the average request 26% faster, and its slowest 5% took about half as long.
| Metric | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| Unique exit IPs | 60,487 | 46,389 |
| Unique ASNs | 166 | 193 |
| Unique cities | 1,970 | 2,013 |
| Success rate | 100% | 99.9% |
| Geo accuracy | 100% | 99.7% |
| Average response | 447 ms | 811 ms |
| 95th percentile | 1,454 ms | 1,549 ms |
Shifter returned 30.4% more unique UK IPs and answered nearly twice as fast on average. Decodo reached more distinct networks, 193 ASNs against 166.
| Metric | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 80,000 | 80,000 |
| Unique exit IPs | 49,449 | 36,678 |
| Unique ASNs | 147 | 89 |
| Unique cities | 4,563 | 4,373 |
| Success rate | 100% | 99.8% |
| Geo accuracy | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| Average response | 443 ms | 713 ms |
| 95th percentile | 838 ms | 1,537 ms |
Shifter found 34.8% more IPs and spread them across 65% more networks, the widest diversity gap in the test.
| Metric | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 70,000 | 70,000 |
| Unique exit IPs | 45,517 | 35,560 |
| Unique ASNs | 308 | 245 |
| Unique cities | 1,247 | 1,242 |
| Success rate | 100% | 100% |
| Geo accuracy | 99.9% | 99.8% |
| Average response | 377 ms | 814 ms |
| 95th percentile | 1,337 ms | 1,295 ms |
Shifter led on IPs, networks and cities, and answered 2.2 times faster on average. Decodo's slowest 5% came back slightly sooner.
| Metric | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 60,000 | 60,000 |
| Unique exit IPs | 22,428 | 23,580 |
| Unique ASNs | 272 | 179 |
| Unique cities | 1,818 | 1,823 |
| Success rate | 100% | 99.9% |
| Geo accuracy | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| Average response | 463 ms | 636 ms |
| 95th percentile | 890 ms | 1,556 ms |
Shifter reached 52% more distinct German networks, 272 against 179, while Decodo led on raw count by only 5.1%.
Pool size is not the whole story
Two networks can serve a similar number of IPs and still behave very differently, because what matters to an anti-bot system is not how many addresses you have but how many different networks they sit on. A pool of 30,000 addresses concentrated in six large ISPs is easier to fingerprint and block than 25,000 addresses spread across 200.
That is where the two providers diverge most. In Germany, Shifter reached 272 distinct ASNs against Decodo’s 179, a 52% wider spread, while Decodo served only 5.1% more IPs. France is the starker case: Shifter found 34.8% more addresses and drew them from 147 networks against 89, a 65% wider spread. Shifter also led in the United States and Canada. The United Kingdom was the exception, where Decodo reached 193 networks against 166.
City coverage was close everywhere, with Shifter ahead in France and Canada and Decodo ahead in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, all by margins under 5%.
Reliability and speed
Both networks were consistent in this test. Shifter placed its exits in the requested country between 99.9% and 100% of the time, against 99.7% to 99.9% for Decodo. Decodo’s success rate ranged from 99.7% to 100% across the five countries, and Shifter’s per-country rates are in the tables above.
Speed favors Shifter at both ends. On average, Shifter was faster in all five countries, often dramatically: 377 ms against 814 ms in Canada, 447 ms against 811 ms in the United Kingdom. At the 95th percentile Shifter was also faster in four of the five, with Canada the exception by a narrow margin.
Read together, those two numbers describe the practical difference. Most Shifter requests come back faster than most Decodo requests, and in four of five countries Shifter’s tail of slow ones is shorter too. If your workload is latency sensitive, that profile suits you. Canada is the one market where Decodo’s worst-case timing was slightly tighter.
What the IPs cost
Coverage only matters relative to what you pay for it. These are the published rates on 5 August 2026, taken from each provider’s own pricing page.
| Monthly volume | Shifter | Decodo |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | $10 for 5 GB ($2.00/GB) | $11.25 for 3 GB ($3.75/GB) |
| 10 GB | $20 ($2.00/GB) | $35 ($3.50/GB) |
| 20 GB | $30 ($1.50/GB) | not published |
| 32 GB | $40 ($1.25/GB) | $81.25 for 25 GB ($3.25/GB) |
| 50 GB | $50 ($1.00/GB) | $150 ($3.00/GB) |
| 100 GB | $100 ($1.00/GB) | $275 ($2.75/GB) |
| 200 GB | $149 ($0.75/GB) | not published |
| 400 GB | $299 ($0.75/GB) | not published |
| Pay as you go | not offered | $4.00/GB |
Shifter is cheaper at every volume both providers publish, and the gap widens as you scale. The entry plan costs less in absolute terms and gives you two extra gigabytes. At 10 GB you pay 57% of Decodo’s price, at 50 GB a third, at 100 GB 36%, and the ladder keeps going down to $0.75 per GB where Decodo’s published pricing stops at $2.75.
Put the two halves of this test together and the value gap is stark. A 100 GB month buys 212,212 measured unique US IPs for $100 with Shifter, against 138,914 for $275 with Decodo. That is 35% fewer IPs for 175% more money.
Decodo’s one pricing advantage is flexibility: it sells pay as you go at $4.00 per GB with no monthly commitment, which suits work that arrives in unpredictable bursts. Shifter does not offer that.
Prices change, so check both pages before you commit, and note that Shifter’s figures include the promotional discount currently applied at checkout.
When Decodo is the better choice
If your traffic arrives in unpredictable bursts, Decodo’s pay as you go at $4.00 per GB with no monthly commitment is something Shifter does not offer. If raw pool size in Germany is the criterion you care about, Decodo returned 5.1% more IPs there, and it reached more distinct networks in the United Kingdom. Its city coverage was slightly wider in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, and in Canada its slowest requests came back a little sooner.
Shifter makes the stronger case on almost everything else. You pay less at every volume both providers publish, from $10 for 5 GB at the entry point down to $0.75 per GB at scale, you get more unique IPs in four of five countries, 52.8% more in the United States, you reach more distinct networks in four of five, and the average request comes back faster in all five, more than twice as fast in Canada. That last one compounds on large crawls: at Canadian averages, a million requests is roughly 105 hours of waiting against 226.
Repeat this yourself
Nothing here depends on trusting us. Point any HTTP client at an IP echo endpoint through both gateways, open a new connection per request so the gateway rotates, and count the distinct addresses you get back. Use the same request count, the same machine and the same hour for both providers, and publish the failures alongside the successes as we have.
We test with our own Residential Proxies on the same footing as everyone else’s, and we publish the results whether they flatter us or not. Run the test against your own targets, in your own countries, and buy the network that wins for your traffic.