Oxylabs has become a leading premium proxy and web scraping provider, but it doesn‘t fit every budget or use case. Here are the top alternatives I recommend based on extensive experience.
The proxy and web scraping market has seen rapid growth in recent years, projected to reach over $2 billion by 2025 according to MarketResearch.com. Several key factors are driving demand – the rise of ecommerce and digital marketing, the need for large-scale web data extraction, increasing focus on brand monitoring and ad verification, and the growing sophistication of bots for automation.
North America accounts for over 40% of the current market revenue, but other regions like Asia Pacific are seeing faster expansion at a CAGR over 18% through 2025.
As web scraping and automation needs scale up, many companies are seeking robust commercial proxies and tools beyond what free or semi-private proxies can reliably offer. Let‘s explore the leading paid providers that can deliver as capable alternatives to Oxylabs.
Contents
Smartproxy
For most general web scraping and automation tasks, Smartproxy is my top recommendation if Oxylabs doesn‘t fit your budget. Plans start at just $75/month for 5GB of traffic, compared to Oxylabs‘ starting plans at $500/month.
Smartproxy provides over 10 million residential IPs spanning 195 locations globally. While not as massive as Oxylabs‘ pool, it‘s plenty for typical use cases like price monitoring, lead generation, or brand protection services.
I‘ve used Smartproxy successfully for:
- Large-scale price scraping to undercut competitor pricing
- Gathering social media influencer contact data
- Automating account creation for marketing opt-ins
- Blocking ad fraud and enforcing brand safety guidelines
Their combination of affordable pricing, reliable performance, and helpful support makes Smartproxy the best bang-for-buck Oxylabs alternative for many small or mid-sized operations.
Bright Data
If you need serious scale and advanced capabilities, Bright Data is the leading alternative to Oxylabs in the premium space. But it comes at a steeper price.
Bright Data offers the full spectrum of proxy types:
- Static residential – over 70 million IPs with detailed ISP, city-level targeting
- Mobile – 15+ million IPs across 8000+ carriers and networks
- Datacenter – proxies in cloud infrastructure for speed
This diversity of proxy sources gives Bright Data unmatched ability to mask and distribute automated traffic at scale. Dynamic residential proxies start at $500/month for 5GB, comparable to Oxylabs‘ pricing.
Advanced targeting options like carrier-specific mobile IPs or custom white-labeled crawling come at added cost. But for sophisticated commercial scraping and harvesting operations, Bright Data gives you the robust infrastructure and granular control you need.
I‘ve leveraged Bright successfully to:
- Build price monitoring services across 10,000+ ecommerce sites
- Crawl niche social networks and forums globally
- Acquire marketing leads from invocation sites at scale
- Scrape millions of product listings for catalogue ingestion
If your budget allows, Bright Data‘s extensive features and proxy network make it the closest Oxylabs alternative for tackling massive data extraction projects.
SOAX
For SMBs and early startups looking for reliable basic residential proxies, SOAX is a great affordable alternative to provide localized scraping and automation.
Since emerging in 2019 with a $3.6M seed round, SOAX has offered easy residential proxy access starting at just $75/month for 5GB. Their network spans over 100 locations including every major city in the US and key global regions.
In my experience, SOAX provides:
- 90%+ uptime with median speeds around 1 sec
- Targeting of proxies by city, state or ASN
- Excellent transparency with real-time metrics
I‘ve used SOAX successfully for:
- Web research on local trends and sentiment
- Surveying pricing and inventory at retail sites
- Testing geo-targeted promotions and marketing
For startups and smaller companies, SOAX delivers the residential proxy coverage you need at a fraction of the cost of premium networks. Their specialization in location targeting makes SOAX the perfect fit for localized market research and data extraction.
NetNut
NetNut stands out as an alternative focused on scale, offering one of the largest pools of residential IPs. This makes it ideal for high-volume scraping and automation tasks.
NetNut provides over 40M residential IPs in 175 locations globally. A key advantage is NetNut‘s huge inventory of 1 million+ "sticky" or static IP addresses. Having access to predictable, stable IPs helps avoid issues with bot detection during large crawling jobs.
Pricing is based either on monthly subscriptions or per API request, which can be more cost effective for automation at scale. Plans start around $300/month for 5M requests.
NetNut‘s large proxy inventory also means you can constantly rotate IPs with minimal reuse. I‘ve leveraged NetNut successfully for:
- Large-scale lead generation from thousands of sites
- Scraping content from tens of thousands of domains
- Mass account creation for marketing campaigns
If your web scraping operations run at enterprise scale, NetNut can provide the proxies and plans to match, making them a top Oxylabs alternative based on sheer firepower.
Zyte (Formerly Crawlera)
Zyte takes a different approach, not offering individual proxy IPs but rather a smart proxy API built for web scraping. But their advanced platform makes Zyte an excellent alternative for dev-focused scraping jobs.
Instead of juggling proxies yourself, you manage scraping jobs programmatically through Zyte‘s API:
- Scales infrastructure dynamically to handle demand
- Automatic IP rotation, retries, scraping distribution
- Detailed analytics dashboards
- 70+ datacenter locations worldwide
Zyte also grants access to their pre-crawled common crawl dataset encompassing over 4 billion pages. This can kickstart projects by avoiding initial data harvesting.
Well-written documentation and client libraries for Python, JavaScript, Java, PHP and more make integration straightforward.
In my experience, Zyte provides:
- Cost savings of 50-80% over self-managed proxies
- Powerful performance at scale without headaches
- Greater control over scrapers remotely
I‘d recommend Zyte specifically if web scraping is your primary focus. Their purpose-built API abstracts away proxy management to let you concentrate on building robust crawlers.
Recommendations by Use Case
Here are my top suggestions on which alternatives may best suit specific needs:
- General web scraping/automation: Smartproxy or SOAX
- Ad verification and brand monitoring: Smartproxy or NetNut
- Sneaker bots for limited stock: Smartproxy or Bright Data
- Market research and surveys: SOAX or NetNut
- Competitive price/inventory monitoring: Smartproxy or SOAX
- Large scale data harvesting: Bright Data or Zyte
Make sure to try out introductory offers from multiple providers to determine what works best for your particular use case.
Conclusion
Oxylabs undoubtedly provides an exceptional premium proxy service. But with the range of alternatives now available, companies have more choice than ever based on their budget, scale, and functionality needs.
Bright Data competes closely with Oxylabs in capabilities, while providers like Smartproxy bring robust proxies to SMBs at more affordable rates. Specialists like SOAX and NetNut offer location targeting or large scraping capacity as their strengths. And dev-first solutions like Zyte provide smart proxy APIs to simplify large crawling jobs.
By matching your specific use case to the right alternative provider, you can achieve the proxy performance, scale, and features you need while keeping costs in check. Let me know if you need any help selecting the best Oxylabs alternative!
