Oxylabs Review

Video Review

Oxylabs Static Proxy Networks

Oxylabs’ static proxy networks cover datacenter addresses from cloud service providers and static residential proxies associated with consumer internet services. Both offer to rent IPs for your exclusive use. 

Features

Powerhouse datacenter proxies.

Out of the two, the datacenter proxies are the stronger option by far. They not only cover nearly all countries around the world (which is incredible for datacenter IPs) but also allow targeting them up to particular cities. Furthermore, Oxylabs controls roughly two million of such addresses, meaning that you can scale as much as you need. What’s more, it ensures high IP diversity, which is always welcome for avoiding subnet and ASN-related bans. 

The ISP proxy service is significantly smaller and less developed. Still, 100,000 IPs are nothing to scoff at. Otherwise, they offer much of the same features: unlimited traffic, domains, and connection requests. The biggest benefit is that you get better access to strict websites that monitor IP reputation, while retaining the speed and long sessions of datacenter proxies.

While both types come in IP lists, there is an option to make them rotate. It requires getting additional software called Proxy Rotator for a fee. 

Finally, take note that both types support the SOCKS5 protocol. They’re the only products from Oxylabs to do that. The reason is probably that the other proxy networks base their pricing on traffic; there’s little sense to use them for streaming, and many other SOCKS-related use cases involve some kind of fraud.

Pricing

Starts from $180 per month.

Both static proxy networks charge for IPs. You can get them for a month or a year at a discount.

The pricing plans start at $180, so they’re more accessible for business clients. Paying this much will get you 100 IPs in the US or 60 IPs in other locations. Note that the price can further change based on your targets and other factors. The plans scale into thousands of IPs.

Oxylabs allows replacing 20% of the proxies per quarter free of charge. Further replacements cost extra. Another upsell, Proxy Rotator, enables IP rotation without you needing to set it up yourself.

The static residential proxies have no public plans. Instead, you’ll have to approach Oxylabs and agree on a custom price.

Performance

Nearly flawless.

We benchmarked Oxylabs dedicated datacenter proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research.

Dedicated Datacenter Proxies

We tested 100 IPs in the US targeting seven popular scraping targets like Amazon and Craigslist. In total, we made ~1,500 connection requests per target.

The proxies turned out to be excellent. They weren’t blocked on any of the targets (even Amazon) and connected to websites quickly. What’s more, the proxy servers ran on a fast line, as evidenced by a download speed of over 100 Mbps.

Rotating Proxy Networks

Oxylabs can offer you rotating proxy networks based on all four main proxy types. There’s also a proxy-based web scraper that simplifies access to protected websites. Each service provides full access to the proxy pool limited only by your traffic allowance. 

Features

Something for everyone.

The headliner here is of course Oxylabs’ residential proxies. They cover all locations and have precise targeting options, with only ASN-level filtering missing. It’s a strong but unexceptional offering on paper. What does stand out is that Oxylabs controls the largest proxy pool in the world. This means not only that you’re likely to actually find IPs anywhere, but that they’ll also be less abused due to fewer people sharing the same addresses.

The mobile proxy network is also huge in size and similar in features. The main difference is that you can’t target cities but in return get to filter IPs by carrier. It’s also one of the few mobile proxy networks that borrow IPs from real people and not dedicated USB dongles. This gives more variety and locations at the expense of limiting traffic use.

For simple web scraping projects, Oxylabs has rotating datacenter proxies. They let you choose from IP pools in six countries: US, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, and Romania. The main benefits here are cheaper rates and the fact that these proxies remain always available, meaning that you can hold the same IP for as long as you like. 

Finally, there are the rotating ISP proxies. At the time, it looks to be the most awkward option, with Oxylabs deliberately limiting available session length. But they can still benefit customers that need the anonymity of residential IPs with more predictability. 

Web Unblocker deserves a separate mention. It’s actually a remote web scraper that integrates like a proxy server. Built on the residential proxy network, this product automatically overcomes websites blocking mechanisms, renders JavaScript, and can even parse some e-commerce pages.

Pricing

Traffic-based plans.

As is customary for rotating proxy networks, they charge for traffic use. You can buy a monthly subscription or pay yearly and get 10% off.

Most of the plans require a hefty commitment. This prices out quite a few hustlers and small-time data collectors. The residential proxies make an exception: Oxylabs recently introduced a pay-as-you-go plan that starts from $15. 

Comparing the five options, rotating datacenter proxies is by far the cheapest option. Its $300 plan gives you 600 GB of traffic, as opposed to 25 GBs with residential IPs – a difference of 25 times! The rotating ISP proxies are slightly more expensive than the residential proxies, and the mobile proxies cost the most.

Overall, Oxylabs’ rotating proxies cost above the industry average. But that’s to be expected, and we shouldn’t compare them with entry-level options. Stood beside other premium providers like NetNut and GeoSurf, they can hold their own. Oxylabs is also cheaper than its main adversary, Bright Data, especially if you need advanced features like city targeting.

Performance Benchmarks

Best-in-market residential and mobile proxies.

We tested Oxylabs residential and mobile proxies for 2022 Proxy Market Research.

Residential Proxies

For our residential proxy benchmarks, we ran:

• One million connection requests over 18 days using the global (unfiltered) gateway.
•  300,000 (or 50,000) connection requests over 14 (or seven) days for each of seven high-value location gateways.
•  1,000 connection requests to each of 10 popular websites.

Tests a) and b) used Cloudflare’s Trace tool as the target. It connects to the nearest Cloudflare data center.

Oxylabs’ residential proxies performed the best out of all providers we tried in most areas. They had the lowest response time that reached 0.5 seconds in Europe and the highest success rate at over 99%.

The only area where they didn’t come first was pool size. Even then, Bright Data and Smartproxy had only marginally more IPs. The proxy pool contained predominantly residential addresses, and it was well balanced throughout all locations. Even in Australia we managed to receive over 20,000 addresses over a week.

Mobile Proxies

The mobile proxy benchmarks were similar but ran on a smaller scale:

• 150,000 connection requests over 14 days using the global (unfiltered) gateway.
• 150,000 (or 50,000) connection requests over 14 (or seven) days for each of seven high-value location gateways.
• 1,000 connection requests to each of 10 popular websites.

These mobile proxies once again were the best we’ve tested. Their two distinguishing characteristics were speed and pool size.

On average, the proxies connected in 1.6 seconds – twice faster than the closest competitor, Bright Data, and faster than quite a few residential proxy networks. In addition, we received over 20,000 IPs in the US and around 1,500 in Australia; this may not sound much, but no other peer-to-peer network came close in comparison.

The results carried well to popular websites, though Oxylabs did run into snags with Amazon and social media platforms. Despite that, the proxies managed to retain over 90% success rate.

Oxylabs Web Scraping APIs

You can choose from four web scraping APIs: Web Scraper API, SERP Scraper API, E-Commerce Scraper API, and Real Estate Scraper API. They allow sending requests to Oxylabs’ endpoint, which then chooses the right proxies and applies anti-detection techniques to retrieve data without fail. The APIs cover just about any website.

Features

One for Google, second for Amazon, third for real estate websites, and fourth for everything else.

The four APIs have similar features. Their main difference lies in focus:

• Web Scraper API attempts to scrape any target you throw at it. However, it doesn’t parse the data, meaning that you’ll simply get the page’s source in HTML (or PNG if you enable JavaScript rendering and opt for it). 
• SERP Scraper API targets the main search engines. It uses a parametrized structure, which allows specifying search properties and entering keywords instead of playing around with URLs. For example, you can choose to get US ad results for the keyword Bitcoin by selecting just a few parameters. 
• E-Commerce Scraper API works specifically with e-commerce websites. It uses something called adaptive parser that relies on machine learning to extract pricing, availability, and other data. 
• Real Estate Scraper API is designed to scrape real estate websites like Zillow, Redfin, Realestate, or Zoopla. It’s not capable of parsing data, but it’s among the cheapest options per 1,000 requests.

The APIs can integrate like a proxy server or an API. The second option offers more features like the ability to send batch requests and retrieve results on demand via webhook. 

All four options are based on Oxylabs’ residential proxy network, so they allow targeting any location around the globe. SERP Scraper API offers city and even coordinate-level targeting for local SEO. It also allows getting data in CSV, though mainly for Google web search results.

What’s more, all Oxylabs APIs come bundled with crawler and scheduler features. The first lets you crawl websites, and has the same price as using Oxylabs’ regular scraping APIs. The latter is a free feature that allows you to schedule tasks.

Pricing

Starts from $99.

The web scraping APIs all charge for successful requests. This makes the pricing more predictable, but such products are more expensive than proxy networks in general. So, you’ll have to calculate if choosing one makes sense for you.  

Web Scraper API and Real Estate Scraper API costs around 2.5 times less than the two other options. That’s because it forgoes data parsing, and scraping websites other than Google or Amazon takes less toll on the underlying proxy infrastructure.

Furthermore, all the APIs throttle requests for entry plans. Still, 15 requests per second is by no means slow, and Oxylabs is ready to increase the limit to 100 requests or more as your needs grow. 

How to Use Oxylabs

This part runs through what it’s like to use Oxylabs. It covers everything from proxy management to documentation and customer service.

Registration

Register directly or contact sales.

You can start using Oxylabs in two ways. First, there’s the usual route: fill in a registration form, confirm your email, and you’re done. However, you won’t be able to do much unless you get one of the two cheapest residential proxy plans – they’re the only ones that allow self-service. If you need something else, you’ll have to talk with your account manager first.

The registration form. Step 2 asks for contact details, Step 3 for your use case.

The second one is aimed at businesses: instead of simply creating an account, you can choose to contact sales. This will require entering your full name, business email, phone number, and industry. Afterwards, a salesman will get in touch and discuss the options with you. 

In any case, you’ll have to go through a KYC procedure before you can start using the services. It’s a standard practice with premium proxy providers.

Dashboard

Comfortable dashboard for proxy management.

When you log in, you’ll find yourself in the Oxylabs dashboard. It has a main window with information about product use and links to resources, separate sections for each product, and a section for subscription management.

The sections expand into smaller sub-sections with more options. For instance, Residential Proxies lets you track proxy usage, manage authorization settings, access the public API and relevant documentation. My Account shows your active products and invoices. 

If you need help, there’s a button to contact an account manager. The button leads to an email, so it’s not very useful in emergencies. For that, there’s another button on the right that connects you to a support agent over live chat.

You can use the dashboard in English or switch to Chinese.

Overall, the dashboard covers almost everything. The only thing missing is a widget for setting up the residential proxies; more on that in a moment.

The dashboard’s main screen.

Proxy Management

No widget for proxy setup. 

The proxy setup procedure depends on the proxy type. For the datacenter IPs, it’s very simple: authenticate your proxies in the dashboard (either with credentials or your IP) and download the proxy list. 

The rotating proxies use backconnect gateway servers. They come in the form of hostname:port. You can either adjust the port number to change location and rotation options or add parameters to the username. The second option is more powerful, as it allows you to specify a state and city.  

• Making a sticky session in the US by changing ports: us-pr.oxylabs.io:10001 - 19999:USERNAME:PASSWORD
• Making a sticky session in the US by altering the username: pr.oxylabs.io:7777:customer-USERNAME-cc-US-sessid-1:PASSWORD

Unlike other providers, Oxylabs has no widget to aid with proxy setup. Instead, you’ll have to go to its documentation page and follow the instructions there. Thankfully, it’s rich with information and includes handy examples. 

The documentation page.

Usage Tracking

Customizable graphs for every product.

You’ll find usage graphs in the dashboard. Their functionality differs by product type.

The rotating proxy networks focus on traffic use, though they also show requests made. You can filter them by sub-user.

Residential proxy usage graphs.

The APIs show response time, daily and total requests.

SERP Scraper API usage graph.

Surprisingly, the static proxy networks have the most detailed usage statistics. They track not only traffic use and the number of requests made but also HTML codes. You can select to filter data by target or subnet.

Dedicated proxy usage graph.

All usage graphs allow selecting custom data ranges. This is convenient considering that some providers limit them to a few pre-sets.

Subscription Management

No wallet and limited self-service.

Oxylabs supports self-service for two of its products: rotating datacenter proxies and the two cheapest residential proxy plans. You can buy the other products by contacting sales.

There is no wallet functionality, so you’ll have to make a transaction every time a plan renews. This isn’t ideal but also not a huge problem, as you’ll likely be making payments monthly.

The dashboard shows how much time there is left until the subscription renews. It also contains a list of downloadable invoices.

My invoices for the residential proxy service.

Public API

Programmatic control for residential and dedicated datacenter proxies.

If you want to access the IPs programmatically, Oxylabs has public IPs. The residential API focuses on managing access and tracking use. The datacenter API allows retrieving proxy lists, whitelisting IP addresses, and monitoring offline proxies. 

The public API.

Supporting Tools

Browser extension and an Android app. 

Oxylabs has an extension Chrome-based web browsers. It allows easily setting up and switching proxy servers on a web browser. The extension works with all proxy servers, not only those of Oxylabs, which is a nice gesture.

The Chrome extension.

There’s also an app for Android. It lets you set up a proxy server on your phone.

Documentation

Extensive documentation that won’t leave you at a loss.

For non-technical questions, Oxylabs provides an FAQ called Learning Hub. It answers the most frequently encountered queries and is aimed at prospective or new users.

The residential proxies learning hub.

Newbies can also read multiple quick-start guides which provide the main information about a particular product in one place.

The quick-start guides.

The technical documentation includes comprehensive usage instructions for each of Oxylabs’ products. The instructions have examples in multiple programming languages, and you can find integration guides with third party software.

An arsenal of third-party integration guides.

Hands-On Support

Excellent customer service.

Oxylabs gives its clients a dedicated account manager who answers all of your questions via email or chat. Outside of working hours, or if you need technical help, you can request instant help from the customer support team. The support speaks in English, Russian, Chinese, and Lithuanian.

In any case, communication is smooth and professional. Even when we asked technical questions, we got fast and well-explained answers.

We also tested how fast the customer support is and asked a question via live chat. The reply came within a minute, which is hard to beat.

Conclusion

Like I said: expectations. If you fall into Oxylabs’ target audience, you can be sure you won’t be disappointed.

It’s not the kind of service where you put something into a cart, pay for it, walk through the door with some flimsy instruction manual, and that’s that.

We’re talking business here: subtle, polished, and no-nonsense. You’ll be making relationships with real people who will remember your name, needs, and proactively try to keep you content. You’ll receive good service, and even more importantly – one that’s reliable. The proxies really are top-notch, and so is the scraping tool.

In a nutshell, you’ll be in good hands.

In return, you will be paying more. The entry threshold is also quite high – for Oxylabs, 20 GB of residential proxies means “basic”. The pricing becomes much more attractive with advanced plans, but at that point we’re dealing with 1TB of data or 5,000 IPs.

It all boils down to two questions: do you need the best proxy service available and will you make full use of it? If yes, then you might have just found yourself a proxy provider.

Oxylabs Alternatives

9.2

Smartproxy is the first place to go if Oxylabs is out of your budget range. It offers similar performance, great user experience, and proxy-based tools. However, fewer features.

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9.1

Bright Data is Oxylabs’ biggest competitor in the premium space. It offers even more features, some powerful proxy management tools, and complete pre-scraped data sets.

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8.8

SOAX is another alternative for SMBs eyeing a reliable service. It has a smaller but stable pool of residential & mobile IPs with very flexible filtering options out of the box.

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