Best Bright Data Alternatives (2026)

Where Bright Data wins, where CompanyData wins

Honest split. Both providers are good. They are good at different things. If you pick the wrong one for your use case, you will overpay and underperform.

The cleanest mental model. Bright Data is what you buy when the source you need is the public web. CompanyData is what you buy when the source you need is the official registry. Many serious buyers run both, with Bright Data for SERP, LinkedIn and social, and CompanyData for KYB, firmographics and the global B2B directory.

What is Bright Data and why do buyers look for alternatives?

Bright Data, founded in 2014 as Luminati Networks and rebranded in 2021, is headquartered in Netanya, Israel and led by CEO Or Lenchner. The business has been owned by EMK Capital LLP since 2017, employs roughly 400 people and reports approximately $300M ARR in 2025. The core product is the world's largest residential proxy network, with 400M+ IPs across 195 countries, and the Web Scraper APIs that sit on top of it. The Dataset Marketplace adds 28 prebuilt datasets covering more than 5 billion records harvested from 250+ source domains including LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Google Maps, Indeed, Glassdoor, Yelp, ZoomInfo, Trustpilot and G2. The slogan, "The web's data, unlocked," sums up the positioning. Bright Data sells access to the open web at scale.

For many use cases this is exactly the right tool. AI agents that need real-time SERP. Recruiting teams mining LinkedIn at scale. Pricing intelligence teams scraping competitor sites under anti-bot defences. Brand monitoring across reviews and marketplaces. Bright Data's 20,000+ paying customers tell the story. There is no serious alternative on raw web-scraping scale.

The reasons buyers shop for alternatives are equally consistent. Pricing complexity. A per-GB proxy meter ($5.88 to $10.50 per GB residential, materially above the $1.50 to $4 competitor average), per-record dataset fees from $0.0025 with a $250 minimum order, and a $499 per month platform minimum widely criticised on Reddit's r/webscraping. Dashboard learning curve. The platform exposes deep functionality that takes time to master. Scraping grey-zone perception. Even with court wins in Meta v. Bright Data and X v. Bright Data affirming public-web scraping legality, enterprise legal review still treats scraping as operationally sensitive, particularly in regulated industries. KYC friction. Borderline use cases face higher scrutiny. And registry-grade firmographics, the kind of authoritative legal-entity data that comes from official business registries, are not what Bright Data sells. That is what they outsource to providers like Dun & Bradstreet or CompanyData.com.

Inside Bright Data: products, datasets and corporate background

Bright Data's product line splits into four layers. Residential proxies are the foundation, with 400M+ IPs across 195 countries. Web Scraper APIs sit on top, offering pre-built scrapers for common target sites. The Dataset Marketplace packages 28 ready-made datasets across e-commerce, jobs, social, business directories and reviews. And the SERP API, Browser API and MCP server handle real-time and agent-driven access patterns.

The business datasets in particular carry 2B+ records, with the LinkedIn-derived person dataset clocking in at 890M+ profiles. Sources include LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Google Maps, Indeed, Glassdoor, Yelp, ZoomInfo, Trustpilot and G2. None of these are official business registries. They are public web properties, harvested via proxy.

Compliance certifications are credible. Bright Data carries GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001 and CSA STAR. The court rulings (Meta v. Bright Data, January 2024 and X v. Bright Data, May 2024) provide a legal moat against the most common objections to public-web scraping. Marketplace presence on AWS, Snowflake and Databricks gives data engineering teams a familiar procurement path.

The trade-off is structural, not fixable by certification. Even with every box ticked, the sourcing model depends on scraping the public web. For sales, marketing, recruiting and AI agent use cases, that is usually fine. For KYB, know-your-business onboarding, supplier verification under EU DPAs and any workflow that needs an audit trail back to an official record, you want a different sourcing model entirely. That is the gap registry-first providers fill.

Scraping vs registry vs identity: which Bright Data alternative do you need?

The Bright Data alternatives market splits into four sourcing models with very different shapes. The wrong category will cost you regardless of which provider you pick inside it.

Bright Data straddles web-scraped and identity-resolved, with strongest depth in scraping infrastructure and meaningful coverage in person enrichment via the LinkedIn dataset. If your need is registry-grade firmographics, you are in the registry-first category and Bright Data is not the answer regardless of price.

EU and GDPR considerations: why EU buyers shop for Bright Data alternatives

Bright Data is Israeli-headquartered and operates under a mix of US, Israeli and EU regulatory regimes. The compliance posture is credible (GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, CSA STAR) and the business has won the major scraping-legality cases in US courts. For most use cases this is enough.

EU procurement and DPA review is a different bar. The questions that come up consistently. Does the sourcing model depend on scraping public web properties, or on official registry feeds? Does the data qualify as public-record by statute, or as public-by-availability? Is there an audit trail back to a primary government source, or only to a scraped third-party page? Under GDPR, the legal basis for processing is cleaner when the data is published by statute (registry-first) than when it is published by availability (scraping LinkedIn).

For EU buyers, EU-headquartered alternatives reduce the friction. CompanyData.com is based in the Netherlands and operates under EU data protection regimes by default, with a registry-first sourcing model that maps cleanly to the GDPR's public-record exemptions. Coresignal is Lithuanian with a cleaner GDPR posture than US scrapers. Apify is Czech with pay-as-you-go pricing. OpenCorporates is UK-based with an open-data ethos. For most EU buyers, layering an EU-headquartered registry-first provider for the KYB and firmographics spine, with optional Bright Data access for SERP and LinkedIn signal, is the cleanest stack.

Is there a free alternative to Bright Data?

Partly. OpenCorporates publishes registry-sourced business information for free via its website. Apify offers a $5 per month credit free tier on its actor marketplace, enough to prototype niche scrapers. National business registries (UK Companies House, UK, Dutch KvK, US SEC filings, German Unternehmensregister) publish basic firmographics free of charge.

For Bright Data's actual depth (400M+ residential IPs, real-time SERP, 28 maintained datasets), no free option exists at scale. The $499 per month platform minimum is the price of entry. CompanyData.com offers free CSV samples on request so you can verify registry coverage before any commercial decision, but the apples-to-apples free comparison for proxy infrastructure simply does not exist.

How to choose the right Bright Data alternative

Work backwards from the use case, not from the provider:

• Need registry-grade B2B firmographics, UBOs, financials and KYB? CompanyData.com and OpenCorporates lead. Bright Data is the wrong category here.
• Need LinkedIn or social profile data at scale? Bright Data's 890M+ LinkedIn dataset is the depth leader. People Data Labs and Coresignal sit just behind.
• Need real-time SERP, browser automation or anti-bot unlocking? Bright Data is the benchmark. No serious alternative matches the proxy network.
• Need AI agent web access via MCP? Bright Data ships an MCP server. Diffbot's Knowledge Graph is the structured-web alternative.
• Need EU GDPR posture for procurement? CompanyData.com, Coresignal, Apify and OpenCorporates all sit cleaner than Bright Data on EU DPAs.
• Need pricing below the $499 per month minimum? CompanyData.com ($25/mo), Crustdata ($50/mo), Apify ($49/mo), Crunchbase ($49/mo) and People Data Labs ($98/mo) all sit below the line.
• Need a free tier you can use indefinitely? OpenCorporates and Apify lead. Bright Data offers trial credits only.
• Need cross-provider comparison? See our Dun & Bradstreet alternatives, ZoomInfo alternatives, OpenCorporates alternatives and Crunchbase alternatives pages for sister angles.

Then request a free sample from your top three. Test it against 50 or 100 real businesses you already know across the jurisdictions that matter. Sourcing model and refresh cadence will separate the contenders fast.

Frequently Asked Questions