Oxylabs is a major proxy provider that competes with services like Bright Data and NetNut for business clients. It’s currently the best-rated company on this website, and one that received our Best Proxy Performance award in 2023. These two details indicate that we consider the provider to be a very strong pick – maybe even for smaller projects that require quality infrastructure.
In this review, we’ll go through Oxylabs’ main products to see how they fare against the alternatives. In addition to a general overview, you’ll find detailed performance benchmarks based on several weeks of testing. Let’s go!
General Information
Oxylabs is a Lithuanian proxy provider running since 2015. It’s one of the biggest companies in the field, offering all kinds of proxy services and several data collection APIs that can help you scrape just about any target.
Oxylabs primarily targets business clients. This reflects everywhere: from a prim and tidy website, to a list of certifications on the homepage and a dedicated account manager. Heck, its products even have insurance! – that’s a first for a proxy company. However, that also means you’ll be paying above-average prices.
This orientation toward enterprises means that Oxylabs would like to lock you into a long-term contract and foster the relationship through account managers. But lately, the provider has been opening up its platform, putting increasing emphasis on self-service and cheaper entry plans.
As a company, Oxylabs invests much effort into business ethics. The provider has made a framework for ethical proxy acquisition and that it’s a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (you can read our interviews on proxy ethicality and KYC guidelines). In addition, Oxylabs partners with governmental and non-profit organizations through projects like 4beta.
Oxylabs Datacenter Proxies
Oxylabs controls the largest network of datacenter proxies in the world – over 2 million IPs from nearly 8,000 subnets. You can buy two kinds of products:
- Dedicated proxy lists for your exclusive use.
- Rotating proxy pool with thousands of shared IPs in multiple locations.
Features
Oxylabs’ dedicated datacenter proxies look impressive. They have nearly no limitations, support SOCKS5, and come from over 150 locations, with an ability to specify states and cities. Their only drawback is no rotation, but that too can be overcome with the provider’s Proxy Rotator add-on.
With a stock of 2 million IPs, you can scale as much as you need. What’s more, this ensures high IP diversity, which is always welcome for avoiding subnet and ASN-related bans.
The rotating proxies revolve around (no pun intended) the US: there are 10,000 IPs there. Western European countries like the UK and France include 2,000 each, while most Asian locations have 1,000. The service is intended for web scraping, so it can switch IP addresses with each connection request or create limited duration sessions. Compared to the dedicated proxies, there’s no SOCKS5 or city-level targeting.
Pricing Plans
Both dedicated and rotating proxies use a subscription-based pricing model. It renews automatically after the billing period.
Oxylabs’ dedicated service bases its rates on the number of IPs you get. Proxies in the US cost the least, while choosing other countries costs up to 66% more. In addition, you may need to pay a different rate for some targets. There’s no self-service for this product, so its pricing is somewhat opaque.
Still, looking at the advertised rates, Oxylabs is actually affordable for a premium provider – if you need at least 100 IPs in the US. Otherwise, its prices are above average until you scale up. Oxylabs allows replacing 20% of the proxies per quarter without paying.
The rotating proxies charge only for traffic use. Starting at $.65/GB and reaching $.44/GB at scale, they cost around the industry average. This service is much easier to pick up, as you can go and buy a plan without dealing with salespeople.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Oxylabs’ rotating proxy pool and 100 dedicated US proxies in March 2023.
Test #1: Infrastructure performance (rotating proxies)
We ran 50,000 connection requests using Oxylabs’ US-filtered rotating proxies. Our computer was located in Germany. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Oxylabs’ rotating proxy network worked flawlessly. Its infrastructure shouldn’t interrupt your data extraction operation, even if you scrape round the clock. Futhermore, theses are among the fastest rotating proxies we’ve tried, outpacing all competitors in our annual market research.
Test #2: Download speed
We tested 10 rotating and 10 dedicated IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
Both the dedicated and rotating IPs should be viable for traffic-intensive tasks like video streaming.
Test #3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Both products displayed similar results: high success rates and respectable latency. The dedicated proxies had a slight edge, but the difference was negligible at this scale.
Oxylabs Residential Proxies
Oxylabs controls around 100 million monthly residential proxies – the largest number on the market. They’re sourced via Honeygain (a bandwidth-sharing app) and partnerships with other app developers.
Features
The service is fully-featured. You can choose from any country in the world and then further specify a state, city, and even ZIP code. Very few providers offer the latter option. Targeting by ASN is also available but only to select customers.
Like most residential proxies, these use the format of endpoint:port. You can rotate IPs with every connection request or establish a sticky session for up to 30 minutes. Oxylabs’ customers in China get two separate endpoints for better connectivity.
As of mid-2023, the residential proxies support the SOCKS5 protocol. However, it’s limited to TCP and website traffic for now. One more important point: Oxylabs blocks access to Google with this product.
Pricing Plans
Oxylabs charges for traffic only. You can pay as you go at a fixed rate of $15/GB – this method lets you buy up to 50 GB of traffic per month. Otherwise, the cheapest plan starts at $300 ($12/GB). If you reach the cap of any plan, there’s an option to top up without getting a new plan.
Compared to the market prices, Oxylabs charges a premium. But the provider’s rates aren’t that bad in this category: it costs a similar amount to NetNut and GeoSurf, and significantly less than Bright Data, especially if you need precise location targeting.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Oxylabs’ residential proxies in March 2023.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 1M requests over 21 days using the unfiltered pool, 500,000 requests over 14 days using the country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
Oxylabs can evidently back up its marketing claims. 3 out of 4 requests gave us a unique IP address in the unfiltered gateway, and we found over 250k American IPs. Even in Australia, where proxies are to come by, Oxylabs was able to produce over 30,000 IP addresses.
And while this isn’t the best result looking only at the unfiltered gateway, Oxylabs led the pack in individual country pools, together with Smartproxy:
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- Unfiltered pool comparison
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- Residential country pool comparison
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
These residential proxies are incredibly performant. Oxylabs’ infrastructure let us down very few times, and its latency was simply amazing for residential addresses. The provider was faster than all competitors in our tests, sometimes by as many as seven times!
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- Success rate comparison
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- Response time comparison
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
The residential proxies were able to access all tested websites smoothly. Unfortunately, they don’t work with Google – but that’s a managerial rather than technical limitation.
Oxylabs Mobile Proxies
Oxylabs controls 20 million monthly IPs on cellular networks. Once again, this is the largest mobile proxy service we know. It’s based on a peer-to-peer model, meaning that your connections will be routed through the devices of real people.
Features
The mobile proxy network supports the majority of features customers could look for. You can select any country and further filter proxies by state or ASN (carrier). Only city-level targeting is missing, and maybe filtering by ZIP code for those who need it.
Being peer-to-peer proxies, they need to rotate. You can select to do that every connection request or create sessions. There’s no limit for parallel connections, so you can use as many IPs at once as you like.
As of recently, Oxylabs enabled the SOCKS5 protocol. However, it only supports web traffic over TCP. Also, it’s important to know that the provider blocks Google by default.
Pricing Plans
You can get Oxylabs’ mobile proxies by subscribing to a plan, which start from $200 ($20/GB). Or, you can buy up to 50 GB of traffic without a subscription at a fixed rate of $22/GB. In any case, any unused traffic expires after a month.
If your needs are large, it naturally makes sense to get a plan. The largest option on display ($4,200) brings the price down to $14/GB. Compared to residential proxies, that’s a lot. However, Oxylabs looks good in relation to other premium services like Bright Data and SOAX.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Oxylabs’ mobile proxies in March 2023.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 280,000 requests over 14 days using the unfiltered pool and country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
Oxylabs’ mobile proxy pool is large and truthful to its claims. With over 70,000 unique IPs in the US, the network should be relatively clean and able to support even large-scale tasks. Oxylabs also had more IPs in major European locations than any other provided we tested.
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- Unfiltered pool comparison
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- Mobile country pool comparison
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
The mobile proxy network had a high connection success rate that was up to par with the industry. It was also faster than all competition, sometimes by several times. Only Smartproxy came close.
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- Success rate comparison
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- Response time comparison
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
The target benchmarks mimicked Oxylabs’ infrastructure results, which is to say they were good. Amazon was the only website to cause the provider some issues – mostly due to timeouts.
Web Scraping APIs
In addition to proxy servers, Oxylabs sells four web scraping APIs. They can return pages just by sending an API call – the provider takes care of anti-bot systems, JavaScript rendering, and retries.
Oxylabs’ general-purpose API is able to scrape any website, but it doesn’t parse data. The other three products target specific website groups, namely search engines, e-commerce, and real estate websites.
Features
The scrapers are pretty stacked in the feature department. You can integrate them as an API and receive data over open connection, create job ids and fetch results whenever you want to (this supports request batching), or replace a proxy server using the endpoint:port format.
As a proxy provider, Oxylabs is able to send requests from any country, up to city and coordinate-level precision where necessary (mostly Google). You can modify the base API call with several parameters – set a different user-agent or ask to render JavaScript. However, the choice is limited: there’s no way to establish sessions, pass custom cookies, or interact with the page.
There are also endpoints for specific targets. Some, like Amazon or Google, can have multiple scrapers. For example, you can use an endpoint for Amazon product pages, reviews, or Google images. The scrapers have tailored parameters (like page language for Google) and are able to accept a search query or product ASIN instead of the full URL.
One of Oxylabs’ strengths is the number of websites it can parse. Many similar services structure Google, maybe some Amazon properties. But this provider maintains parsers for six major e-commerce stores, and there’s even an AI-based tool that attempts to structure any e-commerce page you throw its way.
Finally, the two other uncommon features are crawler and scheduler. Oxylabs gives you the tools to plan scraping jobs and crawl several levels or URLs without writing your own implementation. This can potentially save a lot of time.
Pricing Plans
Request-based pricing that starts from $50.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Oxylabs’ scrapers in January 2023 for our research on web scraping APIs.
Test #1: Google
We made 10,800 requests to Google SERP pages over a week, one request per minute. This served both to test the API’s stability, as well as its ability to open Google.
The web scraping API had a (nearly) perfect success rate throughout the testing period, dropping a negligible amount of requests. Furthermore, it returned results quickly, especially with data parsing enabled.
Test #2: Amazon
We made 1,000 requests to Amazon product pages with data parsing enabled.
The success rate for Amazon was perfect as well. Oxylabs’s APIs returned data even faster than when scraping Google, despite Amazon having larger page sizes.
Test #3: Photo-focused social media network
We made 500 requests to the website’s GraphQL endpoint and 500 more requests fully rendering pages with the headless parameter.
Once again, the API succeeded every single time, proving that Oxylabs has its web scraping infrastructure sorted. However, this time around the response time wasn’t that fast. When accessing GraphQL, the API probably had to retry multiple times; in the headless test, spinning up browsers slowed it down even more.
How to Use Oxylabs
This part runs through what it’s like to use Oxylabs. It showcases the registration procedure, dashboard, proxy setup, and avenues for support.
Registration
You can start using Oxylabs in three ways. First, there’s the usual route: fill in a registration form, confirm your email, and you’re done. The second option is to use your Google account to sign up.
The registration form. Step 2 asks for contact details, Step 3 for your use case.
The third method 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
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.
The dashboard’s main screen.
Subscription Management
Oxylabs supports self-service for some but not all of its products. 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 remains until the subscription renews. It also contains a list of downloadable invoices.
My invoices for the residential proxy service.
Proxy Management
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
Oxylabs has a handy widget to aid with proxy setup. It lets you select the main parameters (location, rotation, etc.) one by one and then generates any number of endpoints you specify. Some products, like the rotating datacenter proxies, don’t have a widget. Instead, you’ll have to head to Oxylabs’ documentation page and follow the instructions there. Thankfully, it’s rich with information and provides useful examples.
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- You can use a widget…
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- … or read the documentation page.
Usage Tracking
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 the number of requests you’ve requests made. You can filter them by sub-user.
The APIs show response time, daily and total requests.
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.
All usage graphs allow selecting custom data ranges. This is convenient considering that some providers limit them to a few pre-sets.
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- Residential proxy usage graphs.
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- Dedicated proxy usage graph.
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- SERP Scraper API usage graph.
Public API
If you want to access the IPs programmatically, Oxylabs has several public APIs. 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
Oxylabs offers a free extension for Chrome-based web browsers. It allows easily setting up and switching proxy servers on a web browser. The extension works with all proxy servers, 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
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. Newbies can also read multiple quick-start guides which provide the main information about a particular product in one place.
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.
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- The residential proxies learning hub.
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- The quick-start guides.
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- Some third-party integration guides.
Hands-On Support
Oxylabs gives each client 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 in about 2 minutes, 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. And some products require going through the whole sales ritual – which is okay for enterprises, but smaller businesses may find it too much. The pricing becomes much more attractive with advanced plans; however, 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
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.
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.
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.
you never mention WHERE THE COMPANY IS BASED
Hosa, thanks for the feedback. Oxylabs is based in Lithuania. I’ll update the introduction to include this.
Guys, I saw u recommend Oxylabs for sneakers. I mean their probably a great provider, but I never saw them promoting their proxies for sneakers. Whats up with that?
Oxylabs has great proxies for sneakers – at least looking at the features and performance. The provider doesn’t promote this use case because it targets larger business customers – and $300 is a lot of money for regular sneakerheads. Still, I’m sure there are quite a few resellers using Oxylabs’ proxies out there.
Damn, wish they would offer a cheaper plan 🙁 But despite that, they look like a perfect provider!
In your opinion, how does Oxylabs fare against Luminati or Geosurf in the terms of being user-friendly? I mean the whole interface, easiness to get around or to find get used to all the features they offer?
Sid, I think all three are relatively user friendly. Luminati can be intimidating at first, but they’ve made plenty of tutorials to help you get around.
Oxylabs have a resellers/sneakerhead package of residential proxies of which are more expensive (for the same quantity) than their normal residential proxies. Will Oxylabs normal residential proxies be exactly the same as the resellers package or would they be using different proxies for resellers?
We haven’t mapped the IPs against one another, so we can’t say. But the reseller proxies might have other value-added features like speed checking or protection against overload.
Would have loved to see how the different proxy networks perform on ipqualityscore.com ( very strict)
bro I was hoping for such review as well… ipqualityscore is very strict