IPLight vs Bright Data (2026)

How to read this page. Every competitor figure below is the publicly listed rate on that provider's own pricing page as checked on 3 November 2026. Prices, tiers and promotions change often — confirm on their site before you buy. IPLight is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a reseller of any provider named here. Where a competitor is genuinely the better fit, we say so.

Quick verdict

Price comparison

Both providers bill residential traffic per gigabyte, but the entry conditions are very different. Bright Data's list price falls as your monthly commitment rises; IPLight's price starts low with no commitment at all.

Read the second column carefully: the cheapest Bright Data per-GB rates require a $499+ monthly plan. If you consume 10–50 GB a month, the rate you actually pay on the entry tier is the pay-as-you-go figure, not the headline volume rate.

Where Bright Data is the better choice

We are not going to pretend these do not matter — for some teams they are decisive:

• Pool scale. 400M+ residential IPs versus 177M+. At high volume with niche city or ASN targeting, the bigger pool finishes jobs that smaller networks cannot.
• Platform breadth. Scraping Browser, SERP API, ready-made datasets and scraper APIs under one contract — if you would otherwise stitch three vendors together, that consolidation has real value.
• Enterprise compliance. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 documentation, plus dedicated account management. If a security review gates the purchase, this is usually the deciding factor.
• Mature tooling. Extensive SDKs, IDE, and integrations that a large team may already standardise on.

Where IPLight is the better choice

• Price per gigabyte. $1 per GB against a listed $8 pay-as-you-go. For the same crawl budget you get several times the throughput, which is the single biggest lever for most teams.
• No commitment. No $499 monthly floor, no allowance that expires if the month is quiet.
• Billing you can predict. Traffic used × one rate. No zone model, no credit accounting, no surprise line items on the first invoice.
• Static ISP at a low per-IP price. $3 per IP per month, $2 from 15 IPs — useful when you need a fixed identity per account rather than rotating traffic.
• Short path to first byte. Sign up, take the gateway host and credentials, send traffic. No onboarding call required for standard products.

Billing model: prepaid traffic vs monthly commitment

Bright Data's volume tiers are monthly commitments with an included GB allowance. Unused allowance does not generally roll over, so a quiet month still bills at plan price. IPLight charges for the traffic you actually push, which suits project-based work — a crawl sprint this week, nothing next week — and makes cost forecasting trivial: gigabytes used × the per-GB rate.

Static IPs work the opposite way at both providers and are priced per IP per month, so they are easy to compare directly. If your workload is "keep 20 fixed identities in Germany for six months", the per-IP line in the table above is the number that matters, not the per-GB rate.

What switching actually involves

Both providers expose a single gateway endpoint with username-password authentication, so migration is a configuration change, not a rewrite:

# Same code, different endpoint: swap host, port and credentials
import requests

proxies = {
    "http":  "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway-host:port",
    "https": "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway-host:port",
}
r = requests.get("https://your-target-site", proxies=proxies, timeout=20)
print(r.status_code, len(r.content))

Keep the concurrency low for the first day and compare success rates per target site against your existing provider. If a specific target performs worse, keep that target on the old provider — mixed routing is normal practice and neither side prevents it.

Frequently asked questions

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