Oxylabs Alternatives: 6 Providers Compared for 2026

Almost none of these searches are quality complaints. Oxylabs runs one of the larger networks in the industry and publishes more of its own operating detail than most competitors do, including the fair-usage thresholds quoted later in this article. The reasons people go looking are structural.

The usual four:

• The bill moves with the work. Per-GB billing means a target that starts serving 4 MB hero images, or a retry storm after an outage, lands on your invoice without anyone deciding anything.
• The entry step is higher than the project. A proof of concept that needs 8 GB and a $200 budget is a bad fit for any residential ladder whose useful rates start several tiers up.
• The catalog is wider than the need. Residential, mobile, ISP, three datacenter variants, Web Scraper API, Web Unblocker and Headless Browser is the right shape for a data team running six projects. It is overhead for one engineer scraping product pages.
• Verification friction. Residential and mobile networks at every reputable vendor involve a verification step. That is appropriate given how those networks are sourced, and Oxylabs notes on its residential page that enabling certain advanced filters may require a KYC check. It is still a reason a two-week project goes elsewhere.

Three of those four are about packaging, not performance. That matters, because it means the fix is often a different billing unit rather than a different network.

If you want the direct head-to-head rather than the roundup, we published SparkProxy vs Oxylabs separately, and it goes deeper on pool-size framing than this article does.

This is the step everyone skips. Oxylabs sells at least four things a customer might individually cancel, and each has a different replacement market.

Read your last three invoices and find the SKU, not the vendor. Two engineers can both say "we are leaving Oxylabs" and need entirely non-overlapping shortlists. If you are not sure which proxy category your workload even requires, settle that first with our comparison of residential vs datacenter vs mobile proxy types, because picking the wrong category costs more than picking the wrong vendor.

Every figure in this article was read from each vendor's own published pages on 31 August 2026 and is their published claim rather than a measurement we took. This category reprices constantly, so treat all of it as a starting point and check the live page before you sign.

If you are leaving Oxylabs for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting a smaller vendor, Bright Data is the swap that changes the least. It covers the same product surface: residential, ISP, datacenter, mobile, plus Web Unlocker, SERP API, Scraping Browser and prepared datasets.

The published shape on brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network as of 31 August 2026: residential and datacenter both offer a pay-as-you-go rate with no monthly commitment, alongside monthly tiers that lower the unit rate as volume rises. Residential pay as you go is listed at $4.00/GB against a struck-through $8.00/GB, with monthly plans at 141 GB, 332 GB and 798 GB. Datacenter is per IP, listed from $1.40/IP pay as you go down to $0.90/IP at 1,000 IPs. ISP sits between them at $1.80/IP down to $1.30/IP. The residential pool is advertised at 400M+ monthly IPs across 195 countries, and the page states that KYC is required for both the residential and mobile networks.

Where it fits: you need the full catalog under one vendor, you want city and ZIP level residential targeting, and the reason for leaving is commercial rather than technical.

Where it does not: if the problem was that per-GB billing made your bill unpredictable, moving to another per-GB vendor solves nothing. Bright Data's monthly residential ladder also starts at a higher absolute figure than Oxylabs' entry plan does, so a small project can end up paying more, not less, even at a lower per-GB rate. That contradiction is the most common mistake in this whole decision.

These two occupy the space between an enterprise contract and a bargain-bin proxy list. Both publish their prices and both let you buy without a sales call.

Decodo

Formerly Smartproxy, renamed in 2025. Residential is sold in per-GB subscription tiers, published on decodo.com/pricing on 31 August 2026 as 3 GB at $3.75/GB, 10 GB at $3.50/GB, 25 GB at $3.25/GB, 50 GB at $3.00/GB and 100 GB at $2.75/GB, with a pay-as-you-go option at $4.00/GB from a 1 GB minimum and a 3-day trial capped at 100 MB. ISP and datacenter products exist and are priced on their own pages.

The relevant detail for someone leaving Oxylabs is the bottom of that ladder. A 3 GB subscription is a genuinely small commitment, which makes Decodo the easiest place to run a two-week residential proof of concept without a procurement conversation. The per-GB rate at that tier is not competitive with anyone's volume rate, and it is not meant to be.

Where it does not fit: high-volume residential, where the tiers converge on rates that large buyers can beat elsewhere. Decodo also does not sell mobile proxies.

IPRoyal

The broadest budget catalog of the six: residential, ISP, datacenter, mobile and a Web Unblocker. Datacenter is per IP and, unusually, sold in term lengths rather than a single monthly rate. As published on iproyal.com on 31 August 2026, a datacenter proxy is $1.57 for 30 days, $1.48 for 60 days or $1.39 for 90 days, across 60+ locations, with HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 support. Residential is listed from $1.75/GB and mobile from $10.11/GB.

One detail is worth pulling out, and this article returns to it below: each IPRoyal datacenter proxy includes 100 GB of traffic per monthly cycle, with more available to purchase. That is a metered product wearing per-IP clothing, and it belongs in the same comparison as Oxylabs' fair-usage thresholds rather than next to anyone's unlimited plan.

Where it does not fit: teams that need a single vendor to carry an enterprise compliance review. The published surface is aimed squarely at self-serve buyers.

SOAX is the narrowest of the six and the most upfront about it. Residential and mobile only, no datacenter product, both billed per GB. Its pricing page on 31 August 2026 lists a free Sandbox with pay as you go from $5.00/GB for Tier 1 countries, a lowest paid plan called Builder at $200/mo plus VAT, and volume buckets that fill in order at 5 TB, then the next 10 TB, then everything above 15 TB.

The structural difference from Oxylabs is that SOAX prices by country tier rather than a single global per-GB rate. If your collection is concentrated in cheaper tiers, that is a real saving. If it is Tier 1 heavy, the headline rate is not the rate you will pay, and you have to model your actual country mix before the comparison means anything.

Where it fits: residential and mobile geo work with a country mix skewed away from the most expensive tiers, and where a free sandbox to validate on matters more than a low headline number.

Where it does not: any datacenter workload. SOAX has no product in that lane, so it cannot replace an Oxylabs datacenter line item at all.

If the SKU you are cancelling is datacenter, the shortlist gets short and cheap fast, because you stop paying for a residential network you never used.

Webshare

The lowest published floor in this comparison, and the only one of the six with a permanent free tier: 10 proxies, no credit card, as published on webshare.io/pricing on 31 August 2026. Datacenter and static residential are both priced per proxy per month, descending steeply with quantity, down to $0.0179 per proxy at 60,000 proxies and $0.225 per static residential proxy at 10,000. Rotating residential is per GB, down to $1.40/GB at 3,000 GB per month.

The free tier is why it belongs on this list. It is the cheapest way in the industry to answer the question that should come first: does my target accept datacenter IPs at all, or will I need residential no matter which vendor I sign with.

Where it does not fit: it is a per-proxy list, so the same arithmetic that constrains Oxylabs dedicated constrains it too. If your target rate-limits hard per IP, a cheap list of addresses is still a list of addresses.

SparkProxy

We sell rotating datacenter proxies and a Scraping API, and nothing else. No residential product, no mobile product, no ISP product, no sub-country targeting. That is a real limitation and it disqualifies us from most of the reasons people leave Oxylabs.

Where it does apply, the difference is the unit. SparkProxy plans are flat monthly and priced by concurrent threads against a pool published at 1M+ IPs across 80+ countries, with unlimited bandwidth: $75 for 100 threads, $140 for 250, $240 for 500 and $440 for 1,000, with annual billing at 15% off. The trial is 24 hours with 250 threads and no card. Rotation is either a fresh IP per request or a 5-minute auto-rotate, and there is exactly one hostname to configure.

# Rotating exit, new IP per request, HTTP/HTTPS
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000 https://example.com/product/123

# Sticky exit, same IP held for the session window
curl -x http://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11002 https://example.com/cart

# SOCKS5 over TCP, for clients whose proxy field prefers it
curl -x socks5h://USER:PASS@gateway.sparkproxy.io:13000 https://example.com

Where it fits: you were on Oxylabs' shared rotating datacenter product, your targets are datacenter-friendly, and your workload is bandwidth-heavy enough that a per-GB meter is the actual problem.

Where it does not: everything else. If your targets reject datacenter ASNs, if you need city or ZIP targeting, if you need a stable dedicated address for a logged-in session, or if you need residential or mobile at any scale, SparkProxy is not the product, and we would rather say so now than watch you churn in month two. For the session-stability case specifically, read what is a dedicated datacenter proxy and then buy per-IP from someone who sells it.

This is the lane where generic alternatives lists do the most damage. Oxylabs Web Scraper API is priced per successful result, listed from $0.25 per 1,000 results with a free trial of up to 2,000 results as published on 31 August 2026. It is a managed unblocking service, not a proxy plan, and swapping it for raw proxies means you inherit the rendering, retries, fingerprinting and parsing it was doing for you.

If you genuinely want that in house, price the engineering rather than just the proxies. If you want to stay managed, compare per-result services against each other. Bright Data, IPRoyal and SparkProxy all sell something in this shape, and the units differ enough that any direct comparison requires conversion first.

SparkProxy's version is credit-based rather than per-result, which is the conversion people get wrong. Plans run $49 for 250,000 credits at 50 concurrent requests, $99 for 1,000,000 at 100 concurrent, $249 for 3,000,000 at 200 and $599 for 8,000,000 at 400, with 1,000 free credits and no card to start. A plain HTTP fetch is 1 credit, a headless render is 5, a premium exit is 10 without rendering or 25 with, and stealth, geo-targeting and custom JS scenarios add 5 each. Credits come off only on success.

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://scrape.sparkproxy.io/api/v1",
    headers={"X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "url": "https://example.com/product/123",
        "render_js": "true",        # headless Chromium, 5 credits
        "block_resources": "true",  # skip images, fonts, stylesheets
        "format": "md",             # clean Markdown out
    },
    timeout=90,
)
print(r.status_code, len(r.text))

Convert before you compare. On the $99 plan, 1,000,000 credits is 200,000 rendered pages, which works out at roughly $0.50 per 1,000 rendered results. Hold that against a per-result competitor rate rather than against the plan price, and be honest about the request profile you will actually run. A workload needing premium exits on every call costs 25 credits a page and prices out completely differently.

Every vendor above quotes its cheapest headline in a different unit. Dollars per GB, dollars per IP, dollars per 1,000 results, dollars flat. Those are not comparable, and no feature table makes them comparable. Two pieces of arithmetic do.

Number one: bytes per useful record

Take your monthly record count and multiply by the average transfer per record. This decides whether per-GB billing is cheap or ruinous, and almost nobody measures it before signing.

A worked example with round figures. Say you pull 400,000 product pages a month. A typical rendered ecommerce page with images and fonts runs around 1.8 MB; the same page with images, fonts and stylesheets blocked runs closer to 350 KB. That is 720 GB against 140 GB for identical extracted data.

At Decodo's published 50 GB tier rate of $3.00/GB on 31 August 2026, those two figures are roughly $2,160 and $420 a month. Nothing about your scraper's output changed. You blocked images. On any per-GB plan, resource blocking is a pricing control rather than a performance tweak, and it is the one line of code that moves the invoice most. On a flat concurrency plan the two figures are identical, which is the entire argument for that model. We work the comparison through properly in understanding datacenter proxy pricing models.

Number two: distinct IPs you must hold in flight

Hammer one IP against your real target until it throttles, and record the ceiling in requests per IP per hour. Then divide your required hourly throughput by that ceiling.

Same 400,000 pages. Spread across 30 days, that is about 555 requests an hour, so against a target allowing 60 requests per IP per hour you need roughly 10 distinct IPs and a small per-IP plan is obviously correct. Compress the same job into 24 hours and you need about 16,667 an hour, which is 278 distinct IPs, and the per-IP model gets expensive quickly. At Bright Data's published 100-IP rate of $1.00/IP on 31 August 2026, that is a few hundred dollars a month in addresses alone, before any traffic.

Deadline, not volume, is what moves this number. It is why two teams scraping the same site at the same monthly total can correctly choose opposite billing models. Shared vs dedicated datacenter proxies covers the identity-stability side of the same trade.

Here is the field that decides whether a per-IP plan behaves like an unlimited one, and no alternatives roundup we have seen puts it in a table. Several vendors that sell "per IP" attach a data threshold to each address, and past that threshold something changes.

Read that honestly and Oxylabs comes out well. Publishing exact thresholds is more transparency than most of this list offers, and a 10x reduction still leaves 10 concurrent sessions per IP, which on a 100-IP plan is 1,000 sessions. Anyone telling you this is a punitive cap has misread it.

The problem is not the size of the ceiling. It is that the ceiling is a function of your data volume and it steps down partway through the month, after a heavy crawl has already committed. Planning capacity against a number that changes when you cross an invisible line is harder than planning against one that does not. If your work is text-light, ignore this section entirely. If you render pages or pull images, it is the first column to fill in for every vendor on your shortlist.

Plenty of these searches should end with the reader closing the tab and keeping the account. Stay if any of the following describes you.

• You need residential or mobile at scale. An advertised 175M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries is not something a datacenter-only vendor replaces, and switching residential vendors to save a few cents per GB is rarely worth re-validating your block rates.
• You target below country level. City, state, ZIP, coordinate and ASN filtering on residential is a genuine capability gap for most of this list. SparkProxy targets by country, full stop.
• Your targets hard-block datacenter ASNs. No amount of datacenter tuning fixes a site that rejects the whole category. Cheaper datacenter proxies are not a smaller version of residential; they are a different thing that will not work.
• You need one vendor and one invoice across residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter and unblocking, with account management and a compliance review attached. Consolidating that onto a smaller vendor usually means giving something up.
• You are running Web Scraper API happily. Pay per successful result is an unusually customer-aligned unit. Do not trade it for raw proxies until you have costed the engineering you would be taking back.
• Your workload is small and text-light. If you pull 5 GB a month of JSON, the difference between any two vendors on this page is a rounding error and migration risk is the larger cost.

The honest version of a comparison article says this out loud. Most pages competing for this keyword are affiliate placements that never name a scenario where you should not switch.

Changing proxy vendor changes your egress ASN set. On a defended target that is not a neutral swap, and latency tests will not tell you about it. Run the cutover in this order.

1. Instrument first. Log per-request outcome, HTTP status, response byte count and target-side rate-limit headers for a full week on Oxylabs. You cannot detect a regression without a baseline, and byte count is the number that will decide your new bill.
2. Run both in parallel for one full crawl cycle. Same URL list, same schedule, traffic split between them. Compare block rate and empty-response rate, not just p95 latency. A vendor that is 40 ms faster and 6% more blocked is a downgrade.
3. Fix authentication before cutover, not during. If you were on IP whitelisting, the new vendor's allowlist has to contain your egress addresses before the first request, and if your workers run on ephemeral cloud IPs you probably want username and password credentials instead. How proxy authentication works covers the trade-off.
4. Migrate one target at a time. Move your least valuable target first and hold it for a week. Vendors differ target by target rather than uniformly, so a per-target rollout gives you a rollback that costs nothing.
5. Keep the old plan alive for one billing cycle. The overlap month is cheap insurance, and it is the only thing that turns a bad migration into an inconvenience.
6. Re-run the byte-count math after the switch. If you moved from per-GB to flat, turn resource blocking off where it was hurting extraction quality. If you moved the other way, turn it on everywhere. The correct scraper configuration is different under different billing models, and this is the step teams forget.

The pattern behind all six steps: change one variable at a time, and measure the thing that actually costs money. Vendor and scraper configuration should never move in the same deploy.