Last updated: August 19, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on August 18 and 19, 2026.
The best Oxylabs alternatives in 2026 are String, Bright Data, Zyte API, Decodo, Nimble, and ScraperAPI.
String is the strongest web scraping API for difficult, bot-protected websites. It passed 97.0% of requests across 99 live targets in the August 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, compared with Oxylabs' 76.8%. Bright Data is the closest match on overall product breadth. Zyte API publishes a price for each domain before a request is sent. Decodo offers less expensive residential bandwidth. Nimble packages search and extraction for agents. ScraperAPI is the budget credit option.
Oxylabs is a serious platform. It operates a large residential network, sells a Web Scraper API with published per-site rates, holds an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate, and bills only successful results. Nothing in this comparison makes it a bad product.
Its specific failure pattern is the reason teams look for an alternative. Oxylabs returned no content on 18 of the 99 benchmark sites, including Amazon, Facebook, Booking.com, Ticketmaster, and Zara. String returned content on 17 of those 18. The misses were not random; they clustered across ticketing, reviews, real estate, travel, and luxury retail. The full leaderboard and per-site results are in the August 2026 benchmark post and the public repository.
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% | 9.98s | 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 | 76.8% | 14.67s | Web Scraper API Starter costs $99 and includes rates of $1.10 per 1,000 successful results on most sites, $1.30 with JavaScript rendering, and $0.45 on Amazon | Eighteen sites returned nothing, with failures concentrated in several commercially important verticals |
| Bright Data | Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking under one contract | 78.0% | 26.14s | No comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies cost $8 per GB | Slowest latency score in the benchmark and committed plans beginning at $499 |
| Zyte API | Existing Scrapy teams | 72.7% | 14.85s | 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 | 70.7% | 22.63s | The 25 GB plan costs $81.25, or $3.25 per GB. Pay-as-you-go costs $4 per GB | Second-slowest latency score, no success on the benchmark's Fastly target, and weaker DataDome performance |
| Nimble | Agent-oriented search, crawling, and extraction | 66.3% | 18.41s | No fixed plan. Extract, Crawl, and Map cost $1.00 per 1,000 requests; Search costs $1.10. The first 5,000 monthly requests are free | 34.7% success against Cloudflare and managed plans beginning at $2,500 per month |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easy targets | 64.2% | 13.65s | No $100 tier. Hobby costs $49 and implies $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages; Startup costs $149 and implies $0.15 | Per-site multipliers reach 30x and anti-bot bypass adds ten credits |
Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 495 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 August 18 and 19, 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 76.8% of benchmark requests with a 14.67-second latency score. The aggregate result is mid-pack. The distribution is the more important issue.
Oxylabs returned nothing on all five attempts for 18 sites: Amazon, Facebook, Booking.com, Kayak, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, AXS, Zara, StockX, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Stack Overflow, Roblox, Mouser, and Temu.
String returned content on 17 of those 18 and cleared all five attempts on 15. Only Temu defeated both.
The Amazon result needs context. The benchmark used Oxylabs' general Web Scraper API adapter. Oxylabs also sells dedicated endpoints for Amazon and other e-commerce sites, often at a lower rate. The 0-for-5 result therefore describes the general endpoint, not every Oxylabs product.
The broader vertical pattern remains. Oxylabs passed 25% of ticketing requests, 55% of review-site requests, 63% of real estate, 64% of apparel and luxury, and 69% of travel. String passed 100% of ticketing, reviews, and real estate; 98.6% of apparel; and 86.7% of travel.
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 per month for up to 98,000 results, Starter costs $99 for up to 220,000, and Advanced costs $249 for up to 622,500. Most sites cost $1.15, $1.10, and $0.95 per 1,000 successful results on those plans. Amazon is cheaper, Google sits between Amazon and the general rate, and JavaScript rendering adds roughly $0.20 per 1,000. Billing is success-based.
Residential proxies are less predictable because they are billed by bandwidth, starting around $6 per GB. 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.
The August Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 99 real websites, fifteen providers, five attempts per site, and 7,425 live requests. Every provider ran through a public adapter in its strongest general anti-bot mode. 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 August results use the rerun. 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 doubles those usage rates. The first 5,000 requests are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark performance. String passed 480 of 495 requests, or 97.0%. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.0% against Akamai; 97.9% against DataDome; 96.7% against AWS WAF; and 88.9% against PerimeterX. It returned content on every attempt for 92 sites, on some attempts for five, and on none for two.
Latency. 9.98 seconds, second among fifteen providers.
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 78.0%, one place above Oxylabs, but its 26.14-second latency score was the slowest in the benchmark. It performed better than Oxylabs against DataDome, Cloudflare, and AWS WAF, but returned partial results on 31 sites.
Verdict. Choose Bright Data when maximum product breadth under one contract matters more than speed. Do not expect the move to solve per-GB billing complexity.
Zyte assigns each domain and request type to one of five public tiers. Pay-as-you-go HTTP responses cost $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000, while browser-rendered responses cost $1.01 to $16.08. A $100 commitment lowers those ranges to $0.10 to $0.95 and $0.75 to $12.00.
Zyte passed 72.7% with a 14.85-second latency score, nearly identical to Oxylabs on speed. It is the best fit for teams already using Scrapy and for buyers whose main concern is knowing the price of a domain before requesting it.
The tradeoff is that Zyte controls the tier and can revise it during quarterly reviews with two weeks' notice.
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.
Decodo passed 70.7% with a 22.63-second latency score, second slowest among the fifteen providers. It performed well against Akamai at 81% but reached only 61% against DataDome and 67% 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 66.3% with an 18.41-second latency score. It performed well against PerimeterX and the proprietary or unlabelled group, but reached only 34.7% against Cloudflare and 44% against Akamai. Twenty-nine 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.
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 64.2% with a 13.65-second latency score. It is faster than Oxylabs and cheaper on easy targets, but it failed every Kasada request and returned nothing on 29 sites.
Choose ScraperAPI when targets are cooperative and volume matters more than hard-site coverage.
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 | 98% | 98% | 100% | 89% |
| Oxylabs | 77% | 67% | 77% | 98% |
| Bright Data | 82% | 60% | 85% | 69% |
| Zyte | 81% | 58% | 61% | 87% |
| Decodo | 61% | 81% | 67% | 76% |
| Nimble | 72% | 44% | 35% | 82% |
| ScraperAPI | 55% | 85% | 60% | 58% |
Oxylabs clearly led PerimeterX at 97.8%, including Skyscanner, one of the two sites String failed entirely. Its weakest areas were AWS WAF at 50% and the benchmark's single Fastly target at 0%.
If PerimeterX protects most of your targets, Oxylabs may still be the strongest option despite its lower overall result.
Across five attempts per site:
| Outcome across 5 attempts | Oxylabs | String |
|---|---|---|
| Content on all five attempts | 68 sites | 92 sites |
| Content on one to four attempts | 13 sites | 5 sites |
| No content on any attempt | 18 sites | 2 sites |
Oxylabs' shutouts included three of four ticketing sites: Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and AXS. It also lost Louis Vuitton, Saks Fifth Avenue, Zara, and StockX in luxury and apparel; Booking.com and Kayak in travel; Trustpilot in reviews; and Apartments.com and Realtor.com 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 76.8% 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, Oxylabs, and Zyte bill successful responses. Bright Data Web Unlocker normally does 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.
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 more than latency.
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.
Stay with Oxylabs when PerimeterX protects most of your targets, 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.
String. It passed 97.0% of requests across 99 targets, compared with Oxylabs' 76.8%. String led against Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, Kasada, and Fastly. Oxylabs led PerimeterX.
The general Web Scraper API returned no content on any attempt for Amazon, Facebook, Booking.com, Kayak, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, AXS, Zara, StockX, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Stack Overflow, Roblox, Mouser, and Temu. Oxylabs also sells dedicated e-commerce endpoints that the benchmark did not test.
On plain fetches, yes: String Growth charges $0.20 per 1,000 at $100 per month, compared with Oxylabs Starter at $1.10 per 1,000 for most sites. String's browser-plus-premium-proxy path costs $4.00, above Oxylabs' $1.30 rendered rate, so the target mix determines the answer. Both bill successful requests; String also rolls credits over.
Decodo. Residential proxies cost $4 per GB pay-as-you-go and $3.25 per GB on the 25 GB plan, compared with Oxylabs' starting rate around $6. The tradeoff is lower benchmark success and slower latency.
Oxylabs' own Web Scraper API trial covers 2,000 results. String includes 5,000 free requests without a card. Nimble includes 5,000 free requests per month. Bright Data's Web Unlocker includes 5,000 free monthly requests. ScraperAPI includes 1,000 free credits plus a seven-day trial with 5,000. Zyte provides $5 in initial credit. Decodo offers a three-day trial with 100 MB.
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 PerimeterX protects most of your target list, when you need raw residential proxies, when its ISO certification is a procurement requirement, or when you use dedicated e-commerce endpoints that the general benchmark did not test.
Yes. The benchmark harness, 99 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.