Oxylabs Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more

Oxylabs was founded in 2015 to capitalize on the growing proxy software market. This Lithuanian proxy service has over 102 million IPs across 195 countries, with the largest networks in the US, the UK, and Germany. Users can access residential, data center, ISP, and mobile proxies. It also offers web scraping APIs and comprehensive datasets (scraped from public sources) for businesses.

Oxylabs focuses on businesses needing proxy services for their operations. For example, a price comparison app uses proxy servers to scrape data from many e-commerce sites. Oxylabs works with certified data centers and offers cyber insurance if clients suffer from proven damage because of a lapse in its proxy network.

We extensively tested Oxylabs to help you decide whether it’s worth adopting. Our review covers crucial aspects like pricing, features, customer support, and user-friendliness. After reading it, it’ll be easy to decide whether to choose Oxylabs as your preferred proxy service or find an alternative.

Oxylabs: Plans and Pricing

Oxylabs’s pricing structure depends on the type and bandwidth of IP. Residential, ISP, mobile, and data center proxies have different pricing, which we’ll break down below.

Residential has three plans: Premium, Venture, and Corporate. Premium costs $800 monthly for 133 GB, Venture costs $1750 monthly for 318 GB, and Corporate costs $4,000 monthly for 1,000 GB or 1 TB. If you don’t need up to 133 GB, a regular pay-as-you-go option is available for $8 monthly per GB. There’s also a custom plan starting at $5,000 monthly for 2 TB and upwards: you can contact the sales team for this plan.

ISP proxies start at $21 monthly for 10 IPs, i.e., $2.10 per IP. The higher the number of chosen IPs, the lower the unit cost. For example, 100 IPs cost $180 monthly, which is $1.80 for each compared to $2.10 each for 10 IPs. If you need 1,000+ IPs, you can contact Oxylabs’ sales team for a custom quote.

Mobile proxies (3G, 4G, or 5G) have three plans: Premium, Venture, and Corporate. Premium costs $800 monthly for 123 GB. Venture costs $1,750 monthly for 292 GB, and Corporate costs $3,000 monthly for 600 GB. If you require less than 123 GB, a pay-as-you-go option is available for $9 monthly per GB. If you need above 1 TB, you can arrange a custom plan starting from $5,000 monthly.

For data center IPs, you can pay per IP or GB. IP pricing ranges from $12 monthly for 10 IPs to $750 monthly for 1000 IPs. Bandwidth pricing starts from $50 monthly for 77 GB to $2,200 monthly for 5 TB. Of course, you can arrange a custom deal if your needs surpass the standard packages.

If you need IPs from a dedicated proxy server instead of a shared one, Oxylabs offers plans ranging from $8.25 monthly for 3 IPs to $5,700 monthly for 3,000 IPs. Oxylabs also offers web scraping APIs ranging from $1.60 to $2.80 per 1,000 requests.

Oxylabs offers a 7-day free trial for verified companies and a 3-day free trial for regular clients. This trial period is short, but it helps you test the features before making a final decision.

Oxylabs: Features

A user’s journey with Oxylabs begins with registration. You can sign up with your email address or an existing Google account. After signing up, you’ll be redirected to a dashboard where you can access all features. Whether residential proxies, mobile proxies, or a scraping API, this intuitive dashboard makes it easy to find what you want.

Let’s dive deeper into the features Oxylabs offers:

Residential proxies

Residential proxies are real IP addresses offered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). They’re tied to real devices in physical locations, allowing you to bypass geo-restrictions for different purposes.

For example, price comparison sites need to scrape localized data from different websites to offer good deals to users. However, retailers are often against price scraping and use geo-restrictions to prevent their sites from being scraped. A residential proxy lets price comparison sites bypass these geo-restrictions and harvest the required data. Because the residential proxy is tied to a legitimate device, the price comparison site operator can visit a website like any normal user.

Retailers also often have different prices for different locations. Residential proxies let price comparison providers visit localized versions of a retail website. Oxylabs provides residential IPs across 195 countries, including over 10 million IPs in the U.S., 5 million+ in China, 3 million+ in Germany, and 3.5 million+ in the United Kingdom.

You can precisely target IPs by country, city, state, ZIP code, and even geographical coordinates, making it easy to get localized data. Oxylabs’ developer-friendly documentation and integrations make integrating these IPs into your app as smooth as possible.

Oxylabs’ IPs are legitimately sourced, which is important in a proxy sector that constantly grapples with illegitimately acquired IP addresses that expose customers to risks. It gets its residential IPs from consenting device owners who agree to join the network in exchange for a benefit, e.g., a VPN service.

ISP Proxies

Residential proxies are reliable for many use cases, but they have limitations regarding large-scale data scraping. Usage restrictions, such as bandwidth limits and available time per day, make them unsuitable for scraping massive amounts of data. Oxylabs mitigates this situation by providing proxies leased directly from ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, and Frontier. You can request a shared ISP proxy (shared by up to 3 users) or a dedicated proxy, which is more expensive.

Oxylabs provides ISP proxies for enterprises with unlimited duration sessions or dynamic IP rotation. These ISP proxies are well-suited for heavy traffic loads, such as mass data scraping, app testing, and ad verification. The tradeoff is their high cost, starting at $2.10 monthly per shared IP.

Mobile proxies

Oxylabs provides a massive mobile proxy pool with 20 million+ addresses. You can filter these IPs by country, state, city, and coordinates to find precisely what you want. Its largest proxy pools are available in the U.S., Germany, France, Canada, and China.

Mobile proxy servers act like mobile devices, enabling users to bypass geo-restrictions and general website blocks. For example, many websites use CAPTCHAs to prevent web scraping bots from accessing their data. But with Oxylabs, you can use real mobile IP addresses to bypass CAPTCHAs and scrape needed data.

A mobile proxy is also an excellent tool for ad verification. Companies use them to monitor whether their ads are displayed to real traffic rather than bots. Likewise, businesses can combine Oxylabs’ mobile proxy service and scraping API to gather and respond to real-time reviews.

Data center proxies

Oxylabs offers data center proxies that aren’t sourced from ISPs. Instead, they come from secondary cloud service providers, offering anonymity and private IP authentication.

Data center proxies are high-speed and perform well, making them a great option for massive data scraping. You can buy them in bulk for a cost-effective sum, starting at $1.20 monthly per IP, compared to $4 for Oxylabs’ residential proxies and $5 for mobile proxies.

Oxylabs provides shared and dedicated data center IPs, the latter of which is more expensive. Shared IPs have unlimited bandwidth, while the bandwidth for dedicated IPs varies by your chosen plan. For both types, you can connect to your proxy servers via the HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 protocols.

Web Unblocker

Oxylabs offers a Web Unblocker that specializes in bypassing anti-bot systems. Many websites use sophisticated systems to prevent scraper bots, but Oxylabs enables you to bypass these systems and scrape needed data. It uses dynamic fingerprinting to simulate human-like browsing, with the same headers, cookies, and JavaScript rendering of a web browser. You’ll use a proxy, but the websites think it’s a legitimate user, and it serves the required content without hassles.

The Web Unblocker also uses machine learning techniques to select and rotate proxies, deciding what works best on a specific site. If your scraping request fails, the Web Unblocker automatically rotates proxies to send another request. This process occurs until the request is finally fulfilled.

Oxylabs users pay for the Web Unblocker according to the bandwidth they consume. The standard pricing packages are $900 monthly for 100 GB, $2,000 monthly for 250 GB, and $3,500 monthly for 500 GB.

Scraping APIs

Data scraping is a common use case of residential, ISP, mobile, and data center proxies. Companies use them to scrape data manually, a process that gets cumbersome when dealing with massive amounts of data. But Oxylabs solves this problem by offering APIs to automate data scraping.

You’ll select the type of data you want to scrape (text, images, prices, ads, social media likes, etc.) and choose your target website. Then, the API goes to work, scraping the data while you focus on other tasks. You’ll be alerted once your data scraping task is complete. Oxylabs offers distinct APIs for scraping search engines, e-commerce, or other public websites.

Oxylabs: Ease of Use

Oxylabs offers an intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate. All features are neatly arranged on the dashboard, with the menu on the left and the viewing pane beside it. The interface sports a white background, purple and black text, and contrasting colours that look visually appealing.

This platform put considerable effort into its proxy integrations, making them easy to understand and deploy. Were user friendliness the only criterion for this review, Oxylabs would get a perfect score.

Oxylabs: Customer Support

Oxylabs provides 24/7 support for customers. You can start a live chat with a support agent or send an email and expect a response within 24 hours. Oxylabs’ support team was active and highly willing to solve inquiries during our test.

Customers can also access complementary support resources, primarily extensive documentation for its features. On Oxylabs’ website, you can find detailed guides and user manuals for all types of proxies, making them easier to configure.

There’s an “Experts” section on Oxylabs featuring web scraping video tutorials. This section provides valuable knowledge from the Beginner to Advanced levels, teaching the ins and outs of website scraping with Oxylabs’ proxies. This section is continuously updated with new videos and includes on-demand Q&A sessions to learn directly from scraping experts.

However, we noticed a drawback. There is no telephone support for customers, which is an inconvenience when paying for an expensive tool.

Oxylabs: The Competition

The proxy software industry is very competitive, with no shortage of rivals to Oxylabs. The main rivals we’d like to highlight are Bright Data, Smartproxy, and SOAX.

Bright Data is excellent for residential, mobile, and data center proxies. It also offers web scraping APIs like Oxylabs. The difference is that Bright Data offers more customizability and is a costlier solution.

Smartproxy is another reliable proxy server provider, although we don’t consider it as good as Oxylabs. On Oxylabs, you can access a pool of 102 million+ IPs, compared to around 65 million on Smartproxy. Oxylabs’ data center proxies support the SOCKS5 protocol, but Smartproxy’s data center proxies don’t.

SOAX provides a large proxy IP pool, web scraping APIs, and a Web Unblocker like Oxylabs. However, it outshines Oxylabs in terms of user-friendliness and customizability.

Oxylabs: Final verdict

Oxylabs is one of the best proxy providers. It offers a massive pool of proxy IP addresses for data scraping and other business tasks. It also offers sophisticated web scraping APIs that let users gather massive datasets from public websites.

We’ll recommend Oxylabs to any business looking for a proxy provider, but it’s worth noting that this tool is expensive. Expect to pay sizeable sums, especially as a high-level user, but the features make this price worthwhile.

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