Oxylabs Alternatives 2026: 6 Tested, Plus Oxylabs vs Zyte
Last updated: November 2, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark: 100 sites, 17 providers, 5 attempts per site. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on October 28, 2026.
What is the best Oxylabs alternative?
The best Oxylabs alternatives in 2026 are String, Zyte, ScraperAPI and Bright Data if you want more pages back, and Decodo and Nimble if you want a different pricing model or a different product shape. String passed 98.6% of requests on 100 bot-protected sites in the October 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Zyte passed 79.6%, ScraperAPI 76.4% and Bright Data 75.4%. Oxylabs passed 67.4%, thirteenth of the 17 APIs tested. Decodo (71.2%, up from 50.6% in September) and Nimble (68.0%) also scored above it, by 3.8 and 0.6 points, so pick those two for their pricing or their product rather than for the margin.
If you are choosing between Oxylabs and Zyte specifically, Zyte finished 12.2 points ahead and the two disagreed on 46 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 API /scrape endpoint with published per-result rates, holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for its proxy and scraper products, and does not bill its own system errors. Nothing here makes it a bad product.
Its failure pattern is the reason teams look elsewhere. Oxylabs returned nothing on 26 of the 100 sites, and it returned nothing on all four ticketing sites: StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and AXS. The best API to scrape ticketing sites shows all 17 APIs on those four. String passed all five attempts on all 26. 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:
- String is best when protected pages need to come back and you want one API call instead of a proxy portfolio.
- ScraperAPI is best for cheap credit-based volume on easier targets.
- Bright Data is best when you want the widest product surface under one contract.
- Zyte API is best when you already run Scrapy and want a published price per domain.
- Nimble is best when the job is agent-oriented search and extraction rather than raw proxy access.
- Decodo is best when residential bandwidth cost matters more than benchmark performance.
TL;DR
- Oxylabs passed 67.4% of requests, or 337 of 500, thirteenth of 17, with a 16.62-second latency score, seventh fastest.
- String passed 98.6%, or 493 of 500, first of 17, with a 4.24-second latency score, the fastest.
- Oxylabs returned nothing on 26 of 100 sites. String returned content on all 100.
- Oxylabs passed 0% of ticketing requests, 50.0% on review sites and 62.9% on real estate. String passed 100%, 96.7% and 100%.
- Oxylabs beat String on four sites: Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch and Barron's (5 of 5 against 4 of 5).
- Zyte finished 12.2 points ahead of Oxylabs, 79.6% against 67.4%, and the two disagreed on 46 sites.
- At about $100 a month, String Growth charges $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches. Oxylabs' $100 Basic plan buys up to 16 GB of Web Unblocker traffic, the product the benchmark ran, at $6 per GB. Its Web API /scrape endpoint lists most sites at $0.90 per 1,000 results.
- Every result comes from a public harness you can rerun with your own API keys.
Oxylabs and six alternatives at a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | At roughly $100 per month | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Difficult targets that need to return consistently | 98.6% | 4.24s | Growth costs $99. Plain fetches cost $0.16 per 1,000; browser or premium-proxy paths cost $0.80 to $0.90; both together cost $3.25. 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 | 67.4% | 16.62s | Basic costs $100 and covers every Oxylabs product. Web Unblocker, the product benchmarked, is $6.00 per GB for up to 16 GB. Web API /scrape charges $0.90 per 1,000 results on most sites, $1.40 with JavaScript rendering, and $0.45 on Amazon | Returned nothing on 26 sites, including all four ticketing sites |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easier targets | 76.4% | 15.19s | 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 | 75.4% | 27.88s | No comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies cost $8 per GB | 72% against Akamai, and committed plans from $499 |
| Nimble | Agent-oriented search, crawling, and extraction | 68.0% | 22.65s | No fixed plan. Extract, Crawl, and Map cost $1.00 per 1,000 requests; Search costs $1.10. 5,000 free requests | 22 sites with no content, 51% against Akamai, managed plans from $2,500 a month |
| Zyte API | Existing Scrapy teams | 79.6% | 14.43s | 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 | 71.2% | 28.29s | The $99 Web Data API plan charges $0.30 to $1.10 per 1,000 requests, and $1.10 with premium proxies and JavaScript, the benchmarked setting. Residential proxies cost $3.25 per GB on the 25 GB plan | 19 sites with no content, second-slowest latency |
Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 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 October 28, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Why people leave Oxylabs
Oxylabs sells a mature residential proxy network, Web Unblocker, and a Web API for scraping. 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.
Hard sites
Oxylabs passed 67.4% of benchmark requests with a 16.62-second latency score. The aggregate result is in the bottom half of the field. The distribution is the more important issue.
Oxylabs returned nothing on all five attempts for 26 sites: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Lululemon, Louis Vuitton, Yelp, Saks Fifth Avenue, G2, StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, StockX, Zara, Kayak, Congress.gov, Facebook, Amazon, eMAG, Booking.com, AT&T, AXS, Roblox, Stack Overflow, and Bing.
String cleared all five attempts on all 26.
The benchmark ran Oxylabs Web Unblocker, its proxy-style unblocking endpoint, with US geolocation and no JavaScript-render header. Oxylabs also sells a Web API with a /scrape endpoint and dedicated scrapers 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, 47.3% on fashion and luxury, 50.0% on review sites, 62.9% on real estate and 64.4% on travel. String passed 100% of ticketing, fashion and real estate, 97.8% of travel and 96.7% of reviews.
Nine of Oxylabs' 26 empty sites were ones that at least 10 of the other 16 APIs returned on every attempt: Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Ticketmaster, Kayak, Congress.gov, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T and Roblox.
A provider that misses scattered pages creates a retry problem. A provider that misses an entire category creates a coverage problem.
The shape of the bill
One subscription now covers every Oxylabs product: Starter costs $30 a month, Basic $100, Flexible $500, and Enterprise starts at $2,500. Web Unblocker, the product the benchmark ran, bills per GB of request and response traffic: $7.20 per GB on Starter, $6 on Basic for up to 16 GB, and $4.80 on Flexible. Its billing docs count a 2xx or 4xx response as successful, even when it lacks the expected content. Oxylabs' Web API /scrape endpoint bills per result instead. Most sites cost $1.00, $0.90 and $0.80 per 1,000 results on Starter, Basic and Flexible. Amazon is cheaper ($0.50, $0.45, $0.35), Google sits between, and JavaScript rendering costs $1.50, $1.40 and $1.30.
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 from 1,000 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. See how Bright Data compares with the rest of the field on the same benchmark.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The October Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 100 real websites, 17 providers, five attempts per site, and 8,500 live requests. Every provider ran through a public adapter. Since the September run, most providers have 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 October 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 vs Oxylabs: 98.6% vs 67.4%
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 $99 per month and charges $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches, $0.90 for premium-proxy fetches, $0.80 for browser requests on a standard proxy, and $3.25 when both browser and premium proxy are required. Starter costs $19 and bills $0.25, $2.40, $1.20, and $4.80 for those four paths. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark performance. String passed 493 of 500 requests, or 98.6%. It passed 100% against AWS WAF, Kasada and Fastly; 98.7% against Cloudflare; 97.9% against DataDome; 97.8% against PerimeterX; and 97% against Akamai. It returned content on every attempt for 95 sites and on some attempts for the other five.
Latency. 4.24 seconds, fastest of 17.
Strengths.
- Highest benchmark success rate.
- Content returned on every attempt at all 26 sites where Oxylabs returned nothing.
- Successful-request billing rather than per-GB billing.
- No charge for blocked requests.
- Automatic per-request escalation.
- Markdown, raw HTML, or a JSON envelope (the default), chosen per request.
- Search, sitemap crawling, and remote Chrome over CDP.
Weaknesses.
- No raw residential proxy product.
- No crawl-to-content endpoint, change monitoring, or document parsing.
- No self-hosted version.
- Kroger returned 2 of 5 attempts, and four sites dropped one attempt each. Oxylabs passed Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch and Barron's 5 of 5 where String passed 4 of 5.
String's MCP server
String's server is listed as ai.usestring/web-access and is hosted at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v3/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. Zyte and Decodo host MCP servers too, at https://mcp.zyte.com/v1/mcp and https://mcp.decodo.com/mcp.
Trying String
curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you", "format": "markdown"}'
Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, and blocked requests are not billed.
What customers say after switching from Oxylabs
We previously used Oxylabs, but we've been really impressed with String.
Rogier, a String customer that moved from Oxylabs, by email.
Bright Data vs Oxylabs: the same product shape at a larger scale
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 75.4%, three places above Oxylabs, with a 27.88-second latency score, fifteenth of 17. It did better than Oxylabs against DataDome, Akamai, Cloudflare and AWS WAF, and worse against PerimeterX, 86.7% to 91.1%. It returned partial results on 40 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.
Oxylabs vs Zyte: which is better?
On the October 2026 benchmark, Zyte is ahead. Zyte passed 79.6% of requests, 398 of 500. Oxylabs passed 67.4%, 337 of 500. The overall numbers still hide how often they disagree. On 54 of the 100 sites they scored the same. On the other 46, Zyte did better on 28 and Oxylabs on 18. On 20 sites one of them returned all five attempts while the other returned nothing: Zyte took 15 and Oxylabs took 5.
| Where | Oxylabs 5 of 5, Zyte 0 of 5 | Zyte 5 of 5, Oxylabs 0 of 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Retail | Best Buy, Coupang | Amazon, AT&T |
| Travel | None | Kayak, Booking.com |
| Fashion and resale | None | Zara, StockX |
| Reviews, local listings and jobs | Yellow Pages, Monster | Trustpilot |
| Social | ||
| Tickets, government, gaming | None | StubHub, Ticketmaster, AXS, Congress.gov, Roblox |
| Developer and search | None | Stack Overflow, Bing |
Zyte also passed SeatGeek on 4 of 5, Lululemon and G2 on 3 of 5, Mouser and Saks Fifth Avenue on 2 of 5, and Realtor.com on 1 of 5, all sites where Oxylabs returned nothing. Both returned nothing on 5 sites: Temu, Apartments.com, Louis Vuitton, Yelp and eMAG. String returned all five attempts on all 5. Temu shut out every API except String.
By anti-bot vendor. Zyte did better against Cloudflare (92% against 68%), AWS WAF (70% against 16.7%), Akamai (68% against 53%) and the one Fastly site (5 of 5 against 0 of 5). DataDome was close, 68.4% for Zyte and 67.4% for Oxylabs. They tied on PerimeterX at 91.1% and on Kasada at 100%.
Latency. Zyte 14.43 seconds, fifth of 17. Oxylabs 16.62 seconds, seventh.
Pricing. They meter different things. The benchmark ran Oxylabs' Web Unblocker, which bills per GB of request and response traffic: the $100 Basic plan covers up to 16 GB at $6.00 per GB. Oxylabs' Web API /scrape endpoint bills per result instead: the same plan lists most sites at $0.90 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 LinkedIn, Best Buy, Coupang, Yellow Pages or Monster, or if you also need its residential proxies. Pick Zyte if your list leans toward ticketing, travel, Amazon, Facebook or Trustpilot, 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 17 web scraping APIs use the same run.
Decodo vs Oxylabs: cheaper bandwidth, a slower API
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 scraping API, now called its Web Data API, with premium proxies and rendering, not its residential pool. On the $99 plan that setting costs $1.10 per 1,000 requests. The other rates are $0.30 on a standard proxy, $0.60 on a standard proxy with JavaScript, and $0.70 on a premium proxy. Premium is the default pool. Decodo bills any 2xx or 4xx response that returns a result, and does not bill its own 500, 524 or 613 failures. A free plan covers up to 10,000 pages scraped a month. Decodo also publishes an MCP server, hosted at https://mcp.decodo.com/mcp.
In the benchmark, Decodo passed 71.2%, 3.8 points above Oxylabs, with a 28.29-second latency score, second slowest of the 17 providers. It reached 68% against Akamai, 65.3% against DataDome and 73.3% 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 vs Oxylabs: agent workflows instead of proxy plumbing
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 68.0% with a 22.65-second latency score, 0.6 points ahead of Oxylabs overall. It performed well against PerimeterX and the proprietary or unlabelled group, but reached only 68.0% against Cloudflare and 51% against Akamai. Twenty-two 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 vs Oxylabs: credits instead of bandwidth
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 76.4%, ninth of 17, with a 15.19-second latency score, sixth 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, and it passed 84.0% there.
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.
Where providers specialize
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 | 97.9% | 97% | 98.7% | 97.8% |
| ScraperAPI | 75.8% | 81% | 70.7% | 82.2% |
| Bright Data | 74.7% | 72% | 74.7% | 86.7% |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 53% | 68% | 91.1% |
| Nimble | 64.2% | 51% | 68% | 82.2% |
| Zyte | 68.4% | 68% | 92% | 91.1% |
| Decodo | 65.3% | 68% | 73.3% | 86.7% |
Oxylabs' strongest columns were Kasada at 100% and PerimeterX at 91.1%, level with Zyte, and its weakest were AWS WAF at 16.7% and the single Fastly site at 0%. Against DataDome it beat Nimble and Decodo, and trailed Bright Data and Zyte. String led every column in this table; across all 17 providers, Context.dev beat it on DataDome and Scrape.do and Firecrawl on PerimeterX.
Where Oxylabs fails: categories rather than isolated pages
Across five attempts per site:
| Outcome across 5 attempts | Oxylabs | String |
|---|---|---|
| Content on all five attempts | 61 sites | 95 sites |
| Content on one to four attempts | 13 sites | 5 sites |
| No content on any attempt | 26 sites | 0 sites |
Oxylabs' shutouts included all four ticketing sites: StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and AXS. It also lost Zara, StockX, Lululemon, Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue in apparel, luxury and resale; Booking.com and Kayak in travel; Trustpilot, G2 and Yelp 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 67.4% rate is not the most relevant number.
Why pricing is difficult to compare
Each vendor measures a different unit:
- String bills successful requests according to the fetch path used.
- Oxylabs bills Web Unblocker and proxy traffic by gigabyte and Web API results by request.
- Bright Data and Decodo bill proxy traffic by gigabyte. Decodo bills its Web Data API by request.
- Zyte bills successful responses by domain tier.
- Nimble bills by endpoint.
- ScraperAPI sells credits with site and feature multipliers.
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 and Zyte do not bill a blocked request, and both bill a site's own 404. Oxylabs Web Unblocker counts any 2xx or 4xx response as successful, so a 403 block page bills. Decodo's Web Data API bills a 2xx or 4xx response that returns a result. Bright Data Web Unlocker normally bills success only, 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.
What $100 a month buys
- String Growth, $99: $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches; $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free and credits roll over.
- Oxylabs Basic, $100, one subscription across every Oxylabs product: Web Unblocker, the product the benchmark ran, is $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB. Web API /scrape lists most sites at $0.90 per 1,000 results, up to 111,000 of them, with $1.40 rendered and $0.45 on Amazon. Residential proxies are $5 per GB, up to 20 GB.
- Bright Data: no comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies are $8 per GB.
- Zyte, $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, $0.75 to $12.00 rendered, by tier.
- Decodo Web Data API, $99: $0.30 to $1.10 per 1,000 requests, with $1.10 for premium proxies and JavaScript. Residential proxies are $81.25 for 25 GB, or $3.25 per GB, and $4 per GB pay as you go.
- Nimble: no fixed plan. Extract, Crawl, and Map are $1.00 per 1,000 requests, Search $1.10, with 5,000 free monthly requests.
- ScraperAPI: no $100 tier. Startup, $149, is nearest and implies $0.15 per 1,000 standard pages; Hobby, $49, implies $0.49.
If you need residential proxies, not a scraping API
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 October 28, 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 | Enterprise, from $2,500 a month, $2.50 per GB from 1,000 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.
Why Oxylabs dropped from 76.8% to 67.4%
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.
The October run, with the same adapter, put Oxylabs thirteenth of 17 at 67.4%. Thirteen sites improved on September, including Skyscanner, Allegro and Zoopla, which went from 0 to 5 of 5. Fifteen fell, including Lululemon, Saks Fifth Avenue and eMAG, which went from 5 of 5 to 0.
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.
Which Oxylabs alternative should you choose?
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 placed ninth in the October run, four places above Oxylabs.
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 17 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.
Switching from Oxylabs to String
What carries over. A Web Unblocker GET moves from a proxy setting to an API call. The URL goes in the body of a POST to String's /v1/fetch, and the username and password become a bearer key. X-Oxylabs-Geo-Location becomes countryCode (a two-letter code). You can drop X-Oxylabs-Render, because String renders pages that need it without being asked. A Web Scraper API realtime POST with source: "universal" maps the same way, with geo_location to countryCode and browser instructions to String's actions.
What you rebuild. Web Unblocker sessions, dedicated sources and parsers such as amazon_product and google_search, the Custom Parser, Push-Pull async jobs, batches of up to 5,000 jobs, the Scheduler, cloud-storage delivery, and the residential proxy pool. String's jsonSchema covers parsing for the fields you name and /search covers live Google results. Amazon jobs on a dedicated source often stay with Oxylabs.
Integrations to reconnect. Oxylabs publishes an MCP server for its newer Web API, a LangChain package, a LlamaIndex integration, agent skills, and a Postman collection. Its docs list no n8n, Zapier, or Make integration. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. Its hosted MCP server runs at mcp.usestring.ai, n8n calls String through the HTTP Request node, and Zapier, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK have setup guides in String's docs.
Test on your own failing URLs first. Start with the categories in the section on where Oxylabs fails above, then add your own URLs that miss today. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, then move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The String vs Oxylabs page compares the two products in more depth.
FAQ
What is the best Oxylabs alternative for bot-protected sites?
String. It passed 98.6% of requests across 100 sites, against Oxylabs' 67.4%. String led or tied Oxylabs against every anti-bot vendor in the run: DataDome, Akamai, Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF, Kasada and Fastly.
Which sites did Oxylabs fail?
Oxylabs Web Unblocker returned no content on any attempt for 26 sites: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Lululemon, Louis Vuitton, Yelp, Saks Fifth Avenue, G2, StubHub, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, StockX, Zara, Kayak, Congress.gov, Facebook, Amazon, eMAG, Booking.com, AT&T, AXS, Roblox, Stack Overflow and Bing. The benchmark tested Web Unblocker. Oxylabs' Web API and its dedicated e-commerce scrapers were not tested.
Oxylabs vs Zyte: which is better?
Zyte, overall. In the October 2026 benchmark Zyte passed 79.6% and Oxylabs 67.4%, and they disagreed on 46 of 100 sites. Oxylabs did better on LinkedIn, Best Buy, Coupang, Yellow Pages and Monster. Zyte did better on ticketing, travel, Amazon, Facebook and Trustpilot. Oxylabs bills Web Unblocker by the GB; Zyte bills per successful response by a site tier it assigns.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Oxylabs proxies?
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.
Is there a free Oxylabs alternative?
Oxylabs itself gives a $5 welcome credit toward any of its products. String includes 20,000 free standard fetches 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's Web Data API has a free plan of up to 10,000 pages scraped a month.
Which alternatives have an MCP server?
String, Oxylabs, Bright Data, ScraperAPI, Zyte, and Decodo publish official MCP servers. Nimble lists MCP integration on managed plans.
When is Oxylabs still the better choice?
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: Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch and Barron's against String, or LinkedIn, Best Buy and Coupang against Zyte.
Can I verify the numbers?
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.