Oxylabs vs Bright Data: Pricing and Pools Compared

Buy Bright Data if residential scale and breadth of managed products are the requirement. Its published residential pool is the larger by a wide margin, its pay-as-you-go entry carries no monthly floor, and its catalog of prepared datasets and site-specific scraper APIs has no Oxylabs equivalent.

Buy Oxylabs if your spend is concentrated in datacenter or ISP addresses, or if your residential per-gigabyte rate matters more than your residential pool size. Its listed residential and ISP entry rates are both lower, and it publishes exact fair-usage thresholds that most competitors keep inside support tickets.

The tie-breaker is not quality. Both networks work. It is whether your traffic is metered per gigabyte, rented per address, or billed per successful result, because that single fact changes which vendor is cheaper by a factor of two on the same job.

Comparing these two as if each sells "proxies" is the fastest way to buy the wrong thing.

Oxylabs sells residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies, with datacenter split into three separately priced products: dedicated static, shared static and shared rotating. Above those sit a Web Scraper API billed per successful result, a headless browser product, and Web Unblocker for automated block bypass. The pricing is granular, which suits a buyer who knows the SKU they need and frustrates one who does not.

Bright Data sells the same four networks plus a wider managed layer: Web Unlocker, a SERP API, a Scraping Browser that accepts your existing Puppeteer, Selenium or Playwright scripts, Web Scraper APIs covering 120+ sites, and ready-made datasets.

Settle which proxy category the work needs before you compare brands. Getting that wrong costs more than picking the wrong vendor, and residential vs datacenter proxies covers the call.

Oxylabs advertises 175M+ ethically sourced residential IPs across 195 countries, filterable by country, city, state, continent, ZIP code, coordinates and ASN, with sticky sessions holding one IP for up to 24 hours. Bright Data advertises 400M+ monthly residential IPs across 195 countries. Note the word "monthly": it counts addresses seen over a period, not addresses available at any instant, so the two figures share no denominator. Both are self-published and neither is audited.

On datacenter, Oxylabs advertises a 2M+ total pool across 188 countries, with a location table listing 930k IPs in the United States and 123k in the United Kingdom. Bright Data lists 1.3M+ datacenter IPs.

Now the part that changes the reading. The Oxylabs 2M+ headline is essentially its dedicated static inventory, published at 1.9M+ IPs. The product that actually rotates the address on every request publishes a 56K+ pool across 44 countries, and shared static publishes 36K+ across 38. If you are buying rotation, the relevant number is 56K, not 2M.

Past a certain size none of this decides anything anyway. A 56K rotating pool and a 1.3M pool behave identically against a target that rate-limits at 20 requests per IP per hour, because the pool is not the bottleneck. What matters is how many distinct addresses you hold in flight at once, which is a billing question, and understanding concurrent connections in proxies covers sizing that.

Every figure in both columns is what that vendor published as of September 2026.

Read this by the SKU on your invoice, not by the vendor name.

Residential. Oxylabs lists residential from $2.50/GB. Bright Data lists $4.00/GB pay as you go, struck through from $8.00/GB, with monthly plans at 141 GB, 332 GB and 798 GB carrying lower unit rates it does not publish in a form we will restate. If residential is your main spend, get both quotes at your real volume rather than comparing entry prices. On published entry numbers alone, Oxylabs is the cheaper start.

Datacenter. Bright Data is per IP only, from $1.40/IP pay as you go and $0.90/IP at 1,000 IPs. Oxylabs dedicated starts higher at $2.25/IP for 3 IPs and falls toward a floor of $1.20/IP; its shared static product starts at $1.20/IP for 10 IPs and falls toward $0.70/IP, capped at 3 users per address. So the Bright Data volume rate undercuts the Oxylabs dedicated floor, while the Oxylabs shared static floor is the cheapest per-address figure either publishes. If you want rotation instead of addresses, only Oxylabs sells a per-GB datacenter product, listed at $0.59/GB at the 20 GB minimum and falling toward $0.44/GB.

ISP. Oxylabs lists ISP from $1.20/IP, below the Bright Data $1.80/IP entry, though the Bright Data $1.30/IP volume rate closes most of that gap.

Neither vendor is cheaper across the board: Bright Data prices its entry to remove friction, Oxylabs prices lower on the address-based products. Our guide to datacenter proxy pricing models shows why one workload lands at wildly different totals under per-IP, per-GB and flat-capacity billing.

Arithmetic on published rates, not a benchmark. Your negotiated rate will differ.

500 GB per month of residential collection. At the Bright Data pay-as-you-go rate of $4.00/GB that is $2,000 before any tier discount. At the Oxylabs listed entry of $2.50/GB it is $1,250. The gap is wide enough that residential-heavy buyers should treat the per-gigabyte rate as the whole decision, and wide enough that both vendors will discount it if you ask.

Bandwidth-heavy scraping of datacenter-friendly targets. Here per-gigabyte billing charges you for something unrelated to your output. Rendering pages with images, fonts and third-party scripts loaded can multiply transferred bytes several times over compared with blocking those resource types, and on a metered plan that multiple hits the invoice while your extracted rows stay identical. Flat-capacity plans price concurrency rather than bytes, so the same job costs the same either way. SparkProxy sells that model: Starter $75 for 100 threads, Core $140 for 250, Boost $240 for 500, Plus $440 for 1,000, each with unlimited bandwidth on a rotating pool of 1M+ IPs across 80+ countries. It only helps on targets that tolerate datacenter IPs, which is the limit of our relevance here.

Raw proxies stop being the whole job once a target runs JavaScript challenges, TLS fingerprinting or a CAPTCHA wall, and this is where the two diverge most.

Oxylabs sells Web Unblocker at a listed $5/GB and a Web Scraper API from $0.25 per 1,000 successful results, with a free trial of up to 2,000 results. Per-result pricing is easy to model because it maps onto rows in your database. Bright Data sells more of these products: Web Unlocker, a SERP API, a Scraping Browser your existing automation connects to, Web Scraper APIs across 120+ sites, and prepared datasets. Where you would otherwise maintain site-specific parsers, buying the parser often beats staffing it.

One caution applies to both. A managed scraper API is not interchangeable with a proxy plan, and teams that swap one for the other inherit the rendering, retries, fingerprint management and parsing they were previously buying, as web scraping API vs self-managed proxies sets out.

For a buyer on a deadline, this often outranks price. Bright Data states that KYC is required for its residential and mobile networks; Oxylabs notes that enabling certain advanced residential filters may require a check. Both are appropriate given how residential networks are sourced. Practically, a residential proof of concept at either company is not a five-minute signup, and a two-week project can lose days to it.

Datacenter is the fast lane at both. Oxylabs offers 5 shared datacenter IPs claimable in the dashboard with no card; Bright Data offers pay as you go with no commitment. If your targets accept datacenter addresses, start there and treat residential as a separate, slower purchase. Whether those addresses should be shared or dedicated depends on how the target rate-limits, and shared vs dedicated datacenter proxies walks through that call.

One genuine Oxylabs advantage deserves naming: it publishes exact fair-usage thresholds. Dedicated datacenter IPs allow 100 concurrent sessions per IP up to 100 GB per IP per cycle, dropping to 10 afterward, and shared static uses the same shape with a 50 GB threshold. That is more operating detail than most vendors publish, and it lets you model a ceiling before you sign rather than discovering it in production.

Oxylabs is the better buy when your spend is address-based rather than gigabyte-based, when residential volume is modest enough that the entry per-gigabyte rate dominates, when you need sub-country targeting down to ZIP code, coordinates or ASN, or when published operating thresholds matter to your capacity planning.

Bright Data is the better buy when residential scale and geographic spread are the requirement, when you want prepared datasets or site-specific scraper APIs instead of maintaining parsers, when a Scraping Browser that accepts your existing Playwright code removes real engineering work, or when you want to start with no commitment at all.

Neither is right when you are running a two-week experiment on small residential volume, because verification and procurement overhead can exceed the value of the test; when your targets accept datacenter IPs and your traffic is bandwidth-heavy, because a flat-capacity plan removes the byte meter; or when you need one specific site and nothing else, because a per-result API prices closer to the value you receive. Fuller shortlists are in Oxylabs alternatives and Bright Data alternatives, both organised by the product you are replacing rather than by brand.

Both vendors look identical in a demo. Instrument first: for one week, log per-request outcome, HTTP status, response byte count and any rate-limit headers your targets return. Byte count decides your bill, and almost nobody records it before switching. Then run both against your ten hardest URLs at real concurrency for at least 48 hours, because success rates on a defended target degrade over hours and a 20-minute test never shows it. Record cost per successful extraction, the only figure that survives a change of billing unit, and score both against the criteria in what to evaluate when selecting a proxy service. Then quote your real volume to both sales teams: published rates start an enterprise conversation in this category, they rarely end it.