Last updated: September 29, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark: 100 sites, 16 providers, 5 attempts per site. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on September 23 and 29, 2026.
The best Oxylabs alternatives in 2026 are String, ScraperAPI and Bright Data if you want more pages back, and Zyte, Nimble and Decodo if you want a different pricing model or a different product shape. String passed 97.0% of requests on 100 bot-protected sites in the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark. ScraperAPI passed 84.0% and Bright Data 74.6%. Oxylabs passed 69.0%, ninth of the 16 APIs tested. Nimble (68.6%), Zyte (68.0%) and Decodo (50.6%) scored below it, so pick those three for their pricing or their product, not for a higher pass rate.
If you are choosing between Oxylabs and Zyte specifically, the two finished one point apart and disagreed on 47 of the 100 sites. The Oxylabs vs Zyte section below has the site-by-site result.
Oxylabs is a serious platform. It runs a residential pool of 175 million IPs, sells a Web Scraper API with published per-result rates, holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for its proxy and scraper products, and bills only successful results. Nothing here makes it a bad product.
Its failure pattern is the reason teams look elsewhere. Oxylabs returned nothing on 24 of the 100 sites, and it returned nothing on all four ticketing sites: StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and AXS. String returned content on 23 of those 24 and passed all five attempts on 22. The per-site results are in the public repository. If you are comparing String and Oxylabs head to head, the String vs Oxylabs page goes further.
The right alternative depends on the job:
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | At roughly $100 per month | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Difficult targets that need to return consistently | 97.0% | 7.06s | Growth costs $100. Plain fetches cost $0.20 per 1,000; browser or premium-proxy paths cost $1.00 to $2.00; both together cost $4.00. Blocked requests are free | No raw proxy-network product, crawl-to-content endpoint, or self-hosting |
| Oxylabs | A large proxy network and managed scraper API from one enterprise vendor | 69.0% | 15.86s | Web Scraper API Starter costs $99, with $1.10 per 1,000 successful results on most sites, $1.30 with JavaScript rendering, and $0.45 on Amazon. Web Unblocker, the product benchmarked, is $75 for 8 GB | Returned nothing on 24 sites, including all four ticketing sites |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easier targets | 84.0% | 12.97s | No $100 tier. Startup costs $149 and implies $0.15 per 1,000 standard pages; Hobby costs $49 and implies $0.49 | Per-site multipliers reach 30x, and anti-bot bypass adds ten credits |
| Bright Data | Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking under one contract | 74.6% | 15.62s | No comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies cost $8 per GB | 47.4% against DataDome, and committed plans from $499 |
| Nimble | Agent-oriented search, crawling, and extraction | 68.6% | 21.54s | No fixed plan. Extract, Crawl, and Map cost $1.00 per 1,000 requests; Search costs $1.10. 5,000 free requests | 25 sites with no content, 53% against Akamai, managed plans from $2,500 a month |
| Zyte API | Existing Scrapy teams | 68.0% | 17.46s | HTTP responses cost $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 and browser responses cost $0.75 to $12.00, depending on the tier | Zyte assigns and periodically reviews the domain tier |
| Decodo | Less expensive residential bandwidth | 50.6% | 25.41s | The 25 GB residential plan costs $81.25, or $3.25 per GB. Pay-as-you-go costs $4 per GB | 50.6% overall, 39 sites with no content, second-slowest latency |
Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 500 requests per provider. The latency score is failure-aware: per target, the p75 of a provider's successful attempts; a provider with no successful attempt on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages, checked September 23 and 29, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Oxylabs sells a mature residential proxy network and a managed Web Scraper API. Both are built for enterprise use, and the company maintains an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification. Teams rarely leave because the platform is unfinished.
They leave for two reasons: some categories of sites do not return, and proxy costs are shaped by gigabytes rather than pages.
Oxylabs passed 69.0% of benchmark requests with a 15.86-second latency score. The aggregate result is mid-pack. The distribution is the more important issue.
Oxylabs returned nothing on all five attempts for 24 sites: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Skyscanner, G2, StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, StockX, Zara, Kayak, Allegro, Zoopla, Congress.gov, Facebook, Amazon, Booking.com, AT&T, CarGurus, AXS, Roblox, and Stack Overflow.
String returned content on 23 of those 24 and cleared all five attempts on 22. Only Temu defeated both.
The benchmark ran Oxylabs Web Unblocker, its proxy-style unblocking endpoint, with US geolocation and no JavaScript-render header. Oxylabs also sells a Web Scraper API and dedicated endpoints for Amazon and other e-commerce sites. The benchmark tested none of those, so the 0-for-5 on Amazon describes Web Unblocker, not every Oxylabs product.
The broader vertical pattern remains. Oxylabs passed 0% of ticketing requests, 53.3% on review sites, 57.1% on real estate, 62.2% on travel and 74.5% on fashion and luxury. String passed 100% of ticketing and travel, 96.7% of reviews, 98.2% of fashion and 85.7% of real estate, where Idealista was its one miss.
Five of Oxylabs' 24 empty sites were ones that at least 10 of the other 15 APIs returned on every attempt: Ticketmaster, Kayak, Zoopla, Facebook and AT&T.
A provider that misses scattered pages creates a retry problem. A provider that misses an entire category creates a coverage problem.
Oxylabs' Web Scraper API is straightforward to price. Micro costs $49 a month for up to 98,000 results, Starter $99 for up to 220,000 and Business $999 for up to 3,330,000. Most sites cost $1.15, $1.10 and $0.75 per 1,000 successful results on those plans. Amazon is cheaper ($0.50, $0.45, $0.30), Google sits between, and JavaScript rendering costs $1.35, $1.30 and $1.00. Billing is success-based.
Residential proxies are less predictable because they are billed by bandwidth: $6 per GB on the $30 Starter plan, $5 on the $100 Basic plan, and $2.50 at 1 TB. Request and response data, page weight, retries, and rendered assets all consume the meter. The target site controls much of the final page cost.
This is the same underlying model Bright Data uses. Moving from Oxylabs to Bright Data may change the vendor without changing the budgeting problem. See how Bright Data compares with the rest of the field on the same benchmark.
The September Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 100 real websites, 16 providers, five attempts per site, and 8,000 live requests. Every provider ran through a public adapter. For most providers this is the first run at their strongest published setting. Oxylabs ran Web Unblocker without the JavaScript-render header; the section on its drop below explains why that matters. A request passed only when the response contained a marker from the underlying page; a captcha returning HTTP 200 counted as a failure.
Disclosure: String built the benchmark and sells the product that ranked first.
The repository is public. It includes the targets, pass criteria, configurations, and adapters, and it accepts users' own API keys. Providers can contest results or submit corrections. Firecrawl did so, its change was merged, and the September results include that change. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware.
This matters because success claims in this market often measure different things. Decodo advertises a 99.92% residential-proxy success rate based on 500 requests to ipinfo.io. That can be a valid measurement while still saying very little about whether Ticketmaster or Zara will return.
String's Web Access API makes one call against any URL. Proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, captcha solving, and browser rendering happen behind the endpoint. There is no pool to configure or bandwidth meter to manage.
Pricing. Growth costs $100 per month and charges $0.20 per 1,000 plain fetches, $2.00 for premium-proxy fetches, $1.00 for browser requests on a standard proxy, and $4.00 when both browser and premium proxy are required. Starter costs $20 and bills $0.30, $3.00, $1.50, and $6.00 for those four paths. The first 5,000 requests are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark performance. String passed 485 of 500 requests, or 97.0%. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly; 98% against Akamai; 93.3% against Kasada; and 92.6% against DataDome. It returned content on every attempt for 93 sites, on some attempts for five, and on none for two.
Latency. 7.06 seconds, fastest of 16.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
String's server is listed as ai.usestring/web-access and is hosted at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp. It can also be installed with npm i @usestring/mcp and authenticated through STRING_AI_API_KEY. It exposes fetch, search, and sitemap tools using the same API and pricing as direct requests.
Oxylabs also publishes an official MCP server, so agent access is not the core difference between the two products.
POST https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch
{"url":"https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you"}
Markdown returns by default. The first 5,000 requests are free, and blocked requests are not billed.
Bright Data is the closest match to Oxylabs on breadth. It sells residential, ISP, datacenter, and mobile proxies alongside Web Unlocker, SERP API, scraper APIs, and datasets.
Pricing. Residential proxies cost $8 per GB pay-as-you-go, with committed plans beginning at $499. Web Unlocker costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests pay-as-you-go and $1.30 on its $499 plan. Premium domains cost more at an unpublished rate.
Benchmark performance. Bright Data passed 74.6%, three places above Oxylabs, with a 15.62-second latency score, fourth fastest. It did better than Oxylabs against Akamai, Cloudflare, PerimeterX and AWS WAF, and worse against DataDome, 47.4% to 65.3%. It returned partial results on 21 sites.
Verdict. Choose Bright Data when maximum product breadth under one contract matters most. Do not expect the move to solve per-GB billing complexity.
On the September 2026 benchmark, neither is clearly better. Oxylabs passed 69.0% of requests, 345 of 500. Zyte passed 68.0%, 340 of 500. The overall numbers hide how often they disagree. On 53 of the 100 sites they scored the same. On the other 47, Oxylabs did better on 26 and Zyte on 21. On 20 sites one of them returned all five attempts while the other returned nothing: Oxylabs took 11 and Zyte took 9.
| Where | Oxylabs 5 of 5, Zyte 0 of 5 | Zyte 5 of 5, Oxylabs 0 of 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Retail and grocery | Best Buy, Lowe's, Kroger, Asda | Amazon, AT&T |
| Travel | American Airlines | Kayak |
| Fashion and luxury | Saks Fifth Avenue | Zara |
| Real estate, classifieds and local listings | Idealista, Cars.com, Yellow Pages | Zoopla |
| Social and news | LinkedIn, The Wall Street Journal | |
| Tickets, government, gaming | None | Ticketmaster, Congress.gov, Roblox |
Zyte also passed SeatGeek on 4 of 5, StockX and Skyscanner on 3 of 5, and Stack Overflow on 3 of 5, all sites where Oxylabs returned nothing. Both returned nothing on 10 sites: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, G2, StubHub, Allegro, Booking.com and CarGurus. String returned content on 9 of those 10. Temu shut out all 16 APIs.
By anti-bot vendor. Oxylabs did better against DataDome (65.3% against 50.5%) and Akamai (67% against 64%). Zyte did better against Kasada (100% against 86.7%) and the one Fastly site (5 of 5 against 0 of 5). Cloudflare was close, 57.3% for Oxylabs and 58.7% for Zyte.
Latency. Oxylabs 15.86 seconds, fifth of 16. Zyte 17.46 seconds, seventh.
Pricing. They meter different things. The benchmark ran Oxylabs' Web Unblocker, which bills per GB of request and response traffic: Micro is $75 a month for 8 GB at $9.40 per GB. Oxylabs' Web Scraper API bills per result instead: Starter is $99 a month, with most sites at $1.10 per 1,000 results. Zyte bills per successful response by a difficulty tier it assigns to each site. At its $100 monthly commitment, HTTP responses cost $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 and browser-rendered responses $0.75 to $12.00. Zyte can revise a site's tier during quarterly reviews with two weeks' notice.
What counts as billable. Oxylabs' Web Unblocker billing docs count every 2xx or 4xx response from the target as successful, even when "the result doesn't contain expected information." Zyte passes a target's own 404 through as a billed response, but does not charge for a ban.
Which to pick. Pick Oxylabs if your list leans toward US big-box retail, grocery, LinkedIn or paywalled news, or if you also need its residential proxies. Pick Zyte if your list leans toward travel, ticketing, Amazon or Facebook, or if you run Scrapy and want a price per domain before you send a request. If your list covers both, neither one covers it alone. Our Zyte alternatives page and the full ranking of 16 web scraping APIs use the same run.
Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, sells residential proxies at a lower rate. Pay-as-you-go costs $4 per GB, while a 25 GB plan costs $81.25, or $3.25 per GB. Larger commitments lower the unit rate further.
The benchmark ran Decodo's Web Scraping API with premium proxies and rendering, $1.20 per 1,000 requests on the $99 plan, not its residential pool. It passed 50.6% with a 25.41-second latency score, second slowest of the 16 providers. It reached 57% against Akamai, 47.4% against DataDome and 46.7% against Cloudflare.
Choose Decodo when the complaint about Oxylabs is primarily price and your targets do not concentrate behind the systems where Decodo struggled.
Nimble sells search, extraction, crawling, and mapping endpoints aimed at agents and data workflows. Extract, Crawl, and Map cost $1.00 per 1,000 requests; Search costs $1.10; and the first 5,000 monthly requests are free. Managed plans start at $2,500 per month billed annually.
Nimble passed 68.6% with a 21.54-second latency score, 0.4 points behind Oxylabs overall. It performed well against PerimeterX and the proprietary or unlabelled group, but reached only 62.7% against Cloudflare and 53% against Akamai. Twenty-five sites returned nothing.
Choose Nimble when the job is search and extraction for agents, not raw proxy access, and Cloudflare is not central to the target list. Our Nimble alternatives page breaks that Cloudflare gap down site by site.
ScraperAPI sells monthly credit bundles. Hobby costs $49 for 100,000 credits, Startup costs $149 for one million, and Business costs $299 for three million. Credits reset monthly.
A standard page costs one credit. Amazon costs five, Google and Bing cost 25, and LinkedIn costs 30. Bypassing Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX adds ten credits. On Hobby, that puts a standard page at $0.49 per 1,000, a Cloudflare-protected page at $5.39, and LinkedIn at $14.70.
ScraperAPI passed 84.0%, third of 16, with a 12.97-second latency score, third fastest. It returned nothing on 9 sites. Its August score, 64.2%, came from an adapter that did not turn on its strongest anti-bot setting; the September run corrected that.
Choose ScraperAPI when targets are cooperative and volume matters more than hard-site coverage. We show how its credit multiplier plays out on protected sites on a page of its own.
Success by anti-bot vendor, across the 63 benchmark sites these four systems protect:
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 92.6% | 98% | 100% | 100% |
| ScraperAPI | 82.1% | 92% | 89.3% | 88.9% |
| Bright Data | 47.4% | 79% | 88% | 100% |
| Oxylabs | 65.3% | 67% | 57.3% | 86.7% |
| Nimble | 58.9% | 53% | 62.7% | 84.4% |
| Zyte | 50.5% | 64% | 58.7% | 88.9% |
| Decodo | 47.4% | 57% | 46.7% | 82.2% |
Oxylabs' strongest column was PerimeterX at 86.7%, and its weakest were AWS WAF at 33.3% and the single Fastly site at 0%. Against DataDome it beat Bright Data, Zyte, Nimble and Decodo. String led or tied every column except Kasada, where Zyte and Apify returned 100% against String's 93.3%.
Across five attempts per site:
| Outcome across 5 attempts | Oxylabs | String |
|---|---|---|
| Content on all five attempts | 62 sites | 93 sites |
| Content on one to four attempts | 14 sites | 5 sites |
| No content on any attempt | 24 sites | 2 sites |
Oxylabs' shutouts included all four ticketing sites: StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and AXS. It also lost Zara and StockX in apparel and resale; Booking.com, Kayak and Skyscanner in travel; Trustpilot and G2 in reviews; and Apartments.com, Realtor.com and Zoopla in real estate.
String returned content on every attempt for each of those targets.
A scattered miss creates retries. A category-shaped miss decides whether the product can ship. If your target list is concert inventory, luxury resale, reviews, or real-estate listings, the overall 69.0% rate is not the most relevant number.
Each vendor measures a different unit:
A gigabyte is not a page. Heavy sites consume more bandwidth than light ones, and retries and rendered assets increase usage. A credit is not a page either: ScraperAPI requests can cost one, five, 25, or 30 credits before anti-bot and rendering additions. Browser use, page actions, and extraction introduce additional meters.
What counts as billable also differs. String, the Oxylabs Web Scraper API and Zyte bill successful responses. Oxylabs Web Unblocker counts any 2xx or 4xx response as successful, so a 403 block page bills. Bright Data Web Unlocker normally bills success only too, but per-GB products charge transferred data whether the request works or not. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404 responses.
The practical answer is to test and price your own target list. The pass rate on that list will matter more than the headline unit price.
Many people searching for an Oxylabs alternative want a different proxy pool, not an API. The most-cited Reddit thread on the topic opens with this: "Are there any alternatives to Oxylabs on the residential proxy front that don't get as many issues with captcha or IP bans? I have the budget but need something more reliable." (r/scrapingtheweb, 30 upvotes, 76 comments.)
A reply further down makes the fair counterpoint: "if the goal is fewer captchas and bans, i'd look at whether the issue is the proxy pool or your request patterns first." A new pool with the same fingerprints, headers and request rate often gets the same blocks.
The benchmark measures scraping APIs, not proxy pools, so the pools below are not tested and not ranked. What each charges, checked September 29, 2026:
| Provider | Pay as you go | Plan nearest $100 a month | Lowest published rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oxylabs | Not offered on the pricing page | Basic, $100 for 20 GB, $5 per GB | Corporate, $2,500 for 1 TB, $2.50 per GB |
| Bright Data | $8 per GB | $499 for 141 GB, $7 per GB | $1,999 for 798 GB, $5 per GB |
| Decodo | $4 per GB | 25 GB for $81.25, $3.25 per GB | $2 per GB at 1 TB (Enterprise) |
Bright Data's page also shows a coupon that halves those rates for three months. The table uses list prices.
If what you want is the page rather than the pool, String skips the pool: you send a URL and pay per page returned, with blocked requests free. Our web scraping API pricing comparison sets the per-page rates side by side.
The August run put Oxylabs sixth of 15 at 76.8%. The September run put it ninth of 16 at 69.0%. The adapter did not change: the harness has called Oxylabs Web Unblocker the same way, with US geolocation and no JavaScript-render header, since its first commit on July 13, 2026.
What changed was the sites. Eight sites that returned content through Oxylabs in August returned nothing in September: StubHub, Zoopla, Congress.gov, AT&T and CarGurus had passed all five attempts, and Skyscanner, G2 and Allegro had passed four. Two moved the other way: Saks Fifth Avenue went from 0 to 5 of 5 and Louis Vuitton from 0 to 1 of 5. The ranking moved too. ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee rose above Oxylabs once their adapters were corrected to their strongest published setting, and Apify, new to the run, entered above it.
Oxylabs documents a JavaScript-render header that the harness does not send. A run with it turned on could score higher, and the repository accepts a pull request that adds it.
Choose String when failures cluster across protected retail, travel, ticketing, reviews, real estate, or luxury sites, and when you want one API rather than a proxy portfolio.
Choose Bright Data when broad proxy and data products under one contract matter most.
Choose Zyte when you already run Scrapy or need published per-domain pricing.
Choose Decodo when residential bandwidth price is the main concern and your targets do not concentrate behind DataDome or Cloudflare.
Choose Nimble when the job is search and extraction for an agent rather than direct proxy access.
Choose ScraperAPI when targets are cooperative and volume is the primary constraint; it also placed third in the September run.
Stay with Oxylabs when you need the residential proxy pool itself, when ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is a procurement gate, or when your workload uses Oxylabs' dedicated e-commerce endpoints rather than its general API.
Oxylabs is a proxy network with a scraper API layered on top. The right choice depends on which of those two products you need and whether your target list falls inside the categories it clears. The full ranking of 16 web scraping APIs uses the same run. If you are still choosing between an API, a framework and a no-code app, start with our comparison of the best web scraping tools.
String. It passed 97.0% of requests across 100 sites, against Oxylabs' 69.0%. String led or tied Oxylabs against every anti-bot vendor in the run: DataDome, Akamai, Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF, Kasada and Fastly.
Oxylabs Web Unblocker returned no content on any attempt for 24 sites: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Skyscanner, G2, StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, StockX, Zara, Kayak, Allegro, Zoopla, Congress.gov, Facebook, Amazon, Booking.com, AT&T, CarGurus, AXS, Roblox and Stack Overflow. The benchmark tested Web Unblocker. Oxylabs' Web Scraper API and its dedicated e-commerce endpoints were not tested.
Neither, overall. In the September 2026 benchmark Oxylabs passed 69.0% and Zyte 68.0%, but they disagreed on 47 of 100 sites. Oxylabs did better on US retail, grocery, LinkedIn and paywalled news. Zyte did better on travel, ticketing, Amazon and Facebook. Oxylabs bills Web Unblocker by the GB; Zyte bills per successful response by a site tier it assigns.
Decodo. Its residential proxies cost $4 per GB pay as you go and $3.25 per GB on the 25 GB plan. Oxylabs charges $6 per GB on its $30 plan and $5 on its $100 plan. The benchmark did not test either pool.
Oxylabs' own Web Scraper API trial covers 2,000 results, and its Web Unblocker trial is 1 GB. String includes 5,000 free requests without a card. Bright Data's Web Unlocker includes 5,000 free requests a month. Nimble lists 5,000 free requests. ScraperAPI gives 1,000 free credits plus a seven-day trial with 5,000. Zyte gives $5 of credit. Decodo offers a three-day residential trial.
String, Oxylabs, Bright Data, and ScraperAPI publish official MCP servers. Nimble lists MCP integration on managed plans. Zyte publishes a guide to building one but does not host one. Decodo does not publish an official server.
When you need raw residential proxies, when ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification is a procurement gate, when you use Oxylabs' dedicated e-commerce endpoints, or when your list matches its wins in this run: Idealista, Autotrader and Foot Locker against String, or US retail, grocery and LinkedIn against Zyte.
Yes. The benchmark harness, 100 targets, pass criteria, and provider adapters are public at github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark. Start with a subset because a full run creates thousands of billable requests.
