Learn more about Oxylabs’s web scraping capabilities, internet connection speed, pricing, proxy gateways, and pools, among other important details about Oxylabs in this Oxylabs review.
The Oxylabs service is a leader in the proxy market with over 50 patents and more than 450 experts working to keep the service running and maintained for you. The service has been operational since 2015.
There is no doubt that their proxies are good as it takes much more than just being functional to be a leader in an industry. But are their proxies the best for you or your tasks? What are the specific details you need to know about the service to make an informed decision whether to purchase proxies from them or not? I will reveal all of these in this Oxylabs review.
An Overview of Oxylabs
First, you need to know that Oxylabs is top-of-the-line and premium, competing against other giants like Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Nimbleway. It offers proxies in all proxy categories ranging from residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies. However, in recent times, it has shifted its focus from just being a proxy service to being a web scraping solution provider with proxies included.
The service is built for enterprise usage, has one of the largest pools of IPs (if not the largest), and has one of the most extensive location support. As with other services, it equally has its cons too which will be described as we move deep into the review.
Parameter | Feature |
IP Type | Residential/Mobile/ISP/ Datacenter |
Price Charged | Bandwidth |
Price Sample | $10/GB (Pay as you go) |
Pool Of IPs | 100+ Million |
Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 |
IP Rotation |
|
Filtering/Targeting | Cites/Countries |
Authentication | IP Authentication and Username/Password |
Speed | Good |
Free Trial | Yes |
Refund Policy | 3 days (Except pay as you go plan) |
Support | Email, Social Media, and Contact Form |
Jurisdiction Location | Lithuania |
Proxy Types
There are about 6 different proxy types offered by Oxylabs, each having what they are specifically meant for and having unique features to support that. Let’s take a look at these proxy types below.
Residential Proxies
What Oxylabs called residential proxies are actually rotating residential proxies, the proxies for large-scale web scraping. They are the type that rotates IPs for you after each request. For this, there is a residential IP pool of over 100 million which it utilizes.
One thing you will come to like about this is that even though the proxies are rotating proxies, there is support for session management, allowing you to maintain the session for up to 30 minutes. But the session proxies shouldn’t be used except when needed.
For tasks like web scraping and everything in each such as SEO scraping, price monitoring and aggregation, marketing research, and ad verification, among many others, the high rotating port that switches to a different IP after each request is the best for you. This is because not changing IPs too frequently will expose your multiple requests which will lead to your IP getting blocked.
However, if you need to maintain a session such as in the case of multiple account management for a limited period of time, then you can use their session ports. This is because session management requires you to maintain the same IP and not doing so is suspicious and can put your account at risk.
Interestingly, one of the features that make it perfect for web scraping is its location support, allowing you to scrape geo-targeted content from any region of the world. Its geo-targeting support allows you to choose IPs from over 195 countries. It also does have support for state, city, ZIP code, and ASN geo-targeting.
In terms of pricing, their residential proxies are competitive for the kind of quality they offer. The plans are priced based on bandwidth usage. There is a pay-as-you-go pricing option that has the price per GB pegged at $10 — this is competitive and within the range of providers of its class.
This makes a high-quality enterprise solution affordable to small proxy users. However, if you are a heavy user, you can go for their package and get a discount on the cost per GB.
Static Residential Proxies
Their static residential proxies offer you static IPs, gotten directly from ISPs and hosted on their datacenter infrastructure. This gives their static residential proxies the speed of datacenter proxies and the undetectability of their residential proxies.
However, the IP is maintained and not rotated. For this, there are over 100K IPs in the pool that you can purchase from — and it is provided as a dedicated proxy, not shared. You also enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
This proxy should be used when you need to maintain a session for a long period of time and is perfect for account management on e-commerce platforms as well as social media. These proxies are also good for streaming content on Netflix, Hulu, and their likes as well as playing online games. It has support for multiple locations which is what makes it possible for you to unblock geo-targeted content with it.
Rotating ISP Proxies
The Static residential proxies are good for account management and content streaming. However, there is a rotating counterpart that uses IPs directly from ISPs too, and that is known as the rotating ISP proxies. The major use case for this one is for multiple account management.
You have better control over the session duration and you are sure the session won’t be cut off compared to their major product (rotating residential proxies). It is this uninterrupted extended session duration that makes it great for multi-accounting. However, it has a smaller pool. Currently, there are over 360K ISP IPs with over 270K from the US.
Even though it is rotating, it is still an ISP proxy and as such, quite fast as their static residential proxies. In terms of pricing, their rotating ISP proxies are expensive and meant for enterprises. The smallest plan is sold for $340 and comes with 20GB, putting the cost per GB at $17. From this, you can tell that while it is a proxy you’ll want to use, it might not be affordable to you except if you have a large project, enough to warrant the cost.
Mobile Proxies
The Oxylabs service also offers mobile proxies with IPs sourced via P2P from different locations across the globe. There are over 20 million mobile IPs in this ready for your usage from all different types of mobile networks ranging from 4G, 5G, 3G, and LTE. These proxies are rotating proxies with automatic IP rotation.
They can be used for scraping as well as limited short-timed account management. The major advantage this has is its mobile footprint, which makes them not easy to block. They also have a better reputation than residential and datacenter proxies. However, they are the slowest out there.
The major use case of their mobile proxies is for accessing sites that can detect residential proxies if abused. They are used majorly on social media networks such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. If you have a difficult-to-access website that even shows captchas when using residential proxies, then mobile proxies are the proxies for you.
In terms of pricing, their mobile proxies will cost you more than their residential proxies as it price per GB is pegged at $22. There are packages available with cheaper cost per GB but those are for those who can spend $200 and above.
Dedicated Datacenter Proxies
Their dedicated datacenter proxies have over 2 million IPs in it from over 180 countries. However, the IPs are dedicated and you can only use the ones you paid for. This is used for accessing sites and managing your accounts on sites that do not block datacenter IPs — aside from the popular websites on the Internet, most other sites do not. One other advantage of this is that it is the fastest proxy as they are hosted on high-performance infrastructures.
The pricing for this is quite affordable but it does have a minimum monetary commitment. The smallest package is sold for $50 and comes with 20 IPs. The cost per IP is $2.5. there is a limit of 1K concurrent sessions for this plan and you can choose from only a few locations including the US, UK, Germany France, Canada, Brazil, and the Netherlands.
If you go for the enterprise plan, you will need to purchase over 500 IPs. But this will give you access to all 180 countries, a dedicated account manager, and unlimited session support, among others.
Shared Datacenter Proxies
Their shared datacenter proxies are the opposite of their dedicated counterparts. Here, what you get is a shared pool of datacenter IPs with over 22K IPs. There is support for auto-IP rotation which makes them a good choice for scraping low-end sites that have relaxed or weak anti-spam systems.
The location support is quite small and you can create an unlimited number of sessions. There are two modes you can utilize here which include high rotation and sticky session.
The sticky session helps maintain IPs for a period of time for account management and session support while high rotating which ranges IP after every request and is good for web scraping. It is cheaper than the dedicated datacenter proxies but comes with limited bandwidth. Pricing starts from $50 and comes with 77GB. However, it is quite slow and has a higher tendency to assign you an already abused IP.
Residential Proxy Features
The Oxylabs service is the favorite of a good number of regular proxy users as well as enterprise customers. And this is not without reasons which can be attributed to their features. Let’s take a look at some of these below.
Huge IP Pool and Precise Geo-Targeting
The IP pool size of Oxylabs is one of its major strengths. It currently has over 100 million residential IPs, enough to handle web scraping projects at any scale. It is also the size of its pool that makes it possible for you to get a good unique IP rate when web scraping. One interesting thing about their pool size is that the pool does not get its IPs from just a single location.
While the United States contributes the most IPs, other countries contribute their quota, allowing you to choose IPs from specific countries you want.
Some of the countries, it has a large pool of IPs enough for large-scale scraping without IP rotation being ineffective. Interestingly, geo-targeting does not only support country-level targeting. There is also support for state, city, and ASN geo-targeting, among others. This gives you more precise control over the geo-location of your IP.
Excellent Session Control
The proxies offered here by default are high-rotating proxies that switch IP after every request. However, there is support for session control, and an excellent one at that. If you decide to use session control, the default time is 10 minutes after which you get a new IP which will then lead to session termination and a new session started. While 10 minutes is the default, you can extend it to 30 minutes and in some instances, could even go as high as an hour.
Setting the rotation time for Oxylabs residential proxies is done by altering the username you use for authentication and adding the rotation time to it. There is a guide on how to get that done on their website.
Session management is what gives these proxies the ability to help you manage your accounts since switching IPs too frequently will lead to suspicions that might get your account blocked. However, you will avoid using a session for web scraping as that will in the case of web scraping, lead to blocks.
Free Trial and Money-back Guarantee Available
Oxylabs has trust in the quality of proxies it offers and is ready to give you a ride for free to see whether their proxies will be a good fit for your use case or not before making a monetary commitment. Their free trial can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Book a demo’ button and filling out the form or sending them an email.
Usually, you will only get a free trial once after which you are expected to purchase a plan if you are satisfied. Interestingly, there is also a friendly refund policy available — set up to help you get your money back if their proxies don’t work for you.
But the money-back guarantee comes with terms and conditions. If you have utilized 20% of their bandwidth, you lose the chance to ask for a refund. There are also other conditions that must be met before you can ask for a refund.
Strict KYC Process
The Oxylabs service has put in place, a strict Know Your Customer (KYC) procedure as well as a risk management system, helping to make sure its customers use its ethically sourced IPs for the greater good and not to use it for illegalities. KYC is compulsory for all users without which you can’t use their proxy network.
The KYC process does not just seek to know the customers and ask for verification but also needs to know what a user wants to use their proxies for and has the right to refuse their usage if the use case is not in line with accepted practices. They can also use this to stop malicious activities before they cause maximum damage to those they couldn’t stop at the point of doing the KYC.
Insurance Support
How about you use a provider that has insurance that will compensate you for losses incurred which is their own fault? Well, the Oxylabs service is currently the only provider that does that. Using Lloyd's insurance, the Oxylabs service is able to provide insurance provided you are able to prove your loss and prove it was caused by them.
This is quite impressive and one that gives you peace of mind as you will get compensation. However, it is important you know that as with other forms of insurance, the systems have been designed in such a way that makes it difficult for you to access the compensation and as such, this alone shouldn’t be the reason you will use them.
Residential Proxy Performance
In this section, I will reveal to you, details of the actual performance of their residential proxies especially as it relates to scraping since that is the major use case of their residential proxies.
Proxy IP Geo Test
One of the bragging rights of residential proxy services is the number of countries they support. However, location support is much more than a bragging right, it gives an idea of the locations where a service has a large pool enough to make IP rotation efficient for web scraping activities.
While most providers will claim to support over 190 countries, the countries they have a sizeable IP is less than 20. Where does the Oxylabs service stand in this regard? It is one of the few providers that have sizeable pools in many countries. Below is a chart of its IP distribution for some of the popular countries.
As you can see above, 11% of its IPs are from the United States which accounts for 11 million out of the total over 100 million IPs. This number makes it US IP pool larger than the total pool size of many of the small providers like Hydraproxy, proxy-cheap, ProxyEmpire, Genode, and their like which all have less than 10 million total IP size.
This makes Oxylabs the perfect proxy service for accessing US-targeted content. Aside from the US, there are other countries you can get over a million IPs such as China (5 million), Brazil (4 million), the United Kingdom (3.6 million), Germany (3.5 million), and a few other countries. For the other countries, it has more IPs than most other providers too.
Proxy Success Rate Test
If you think 100 percent of all of the requests your web scraper will send will succeed on their first try, then you are delusional. And while the issue can be from your web scraper or your target server, the residential proxies you use are also a culprit. This is because connection errors, retries, and sometimes blocks are to be expected.
However, your job is to use a residential proxy that will put that to a minimum so that you enjoy a higher success rate. We tested the success rate of Oxylabs by sending 300 concurrent requests against some known targets online. Below is the result of the test carried out.
The average success rate was 96.2% which is one of the highest we recorded while testing out the residential proxies on our watch list. If you look at the chart above, you will see that the success rate for e-commerce sites is higher than the average as the success rate for Adidas is 97%, that of Amazon, 95%, and Craigslist 96%.
This makes it the perfect provider for e-commerce scraping. The result is also not bad for both social media and search engines. With these success rate results, you can tell the proxies it offers are undetectable proxies and perfect for accessing all kinds of websites.
Response Time Test
If you are conversant with residential proxies, you will know they are somehow slow. They constitute part of the bottleneck in web scraping and in some situations, they are even the main bottleneck. So you are advised to pick one of the fastest you can get. The response time of popular residential proxies ranges from between 0.48 seconds to 3.72 seconds. Where do Oxylabs’ residential proxies stand in this?
As you can see from the above, the average response time you will enjoy using Oxylabs is 0.62 seconds which is one of the fastest out there. There are other providers that are a little faster such as Bright Data, Nimbleway, Smartproxy, and Soax. However, the difference in speed here can be overlooked as it is equally a faster provider, helping you to access the data you need in a timely manner.
Unique IP Test
The unique IP test seeks to reveal the percentage of unique IPs you should expect when using the high rotation feature to scrape data. Usually, most providers will want you to believe you get new IPs after every request but this is not usually the case. However, with over 100 million IPs in Oxylabs' residential proxy pool, we expect something close to the ideal.
To test this out, we send over 500K web requests to a website without using geo-targeting or even any parameter to see how many of the assigned IPs are unique and how many will be duplicated. Below is the result of the test together with that of other providers.
From the chart above, you will see that the duplicate rate of Oxylabs is 12.35%. This means over 87% of the assigned IPs are unique. Again, just like in the case of the other metrics, this is one of the best in the market. I can say that even though there are other providers with a better unique rate, the difference is negligible and won’t make any difference even in a large-scale web scraping project at any scale.
How to Use Oxylabs
The Oxylans service is one of the leaders in the market and supports most of the advanced features there are in the market. However, it is still easy to use and you can either use the self-service user dashboard or access their service via their developer API. Generally, if you have used other proxies in the past, Oxylabs is not different.
All you need is to create an account, purchase a plan, and get the proxy credentials from the user dashboard. The necessary credentials include proxy address, port, username, and password. If you need to use the geo-targeting option, all you need to do is tweak the username and include the country code and city name such as “customer-USERNAME-cc-GB-city-london”
It might interest you to know that the service supports a proxy endpoint generator, allowing you to create as many endpoints as you like at no extra cost. You can use this in case you need multiple proxy endpoints to use in the same application as in the case of multiple account management.
If you don’t need to use the geo-targeting feature, you can use IP authentication by just whitelisting your IP. With this, no need to provide a username and password for authentication.
Customer Support
One of the core strengths of the Oxylabs service is customer support. I say this because, unlike some other providers, we don’t interact with their customer support often, this one has been on our watch list for over 4 years, and for this period, we have had reasons to speak with their customer support and the responses were swift and helpful.
Just this morning while writing this review, I sent them a message and got a response in less than one minute in their live chat support. This is one of the fastest live chat teams I have used.
Interestingly, they didn’t stop there. If you are an enterprise customer, you get a dedicated account manager for more personalized customer service. For regular users, live chat is also not the only way to get support. You can create a support ticket or contact them via email.
I have had to use their email too and the speed is also fast. In essence, if you are looking for a service that will provide you with swift customer support, you won’t go wrong using their service.
Source of IP Addresses
The Oxylabs service has over 100 million residential IPs in its pool. What is not obvious to you is that they do not own the IP addresses as the IPs are sourced via P2P. However, there are different methods residential proxies get their IPs and some can be ethical or not while others can even illegal.
The Oxylabs service is an ethical provider and as such, its IPs are sourced via ethical means. It even provided a document, describing how it sources its IPs. Here is a link to the document.
According to the document, the majority of their IPs are sourced by getting users to install their applications on their devices either in exchange for financial compensation or to be allowed to use the utility app provided for free. In either case, the users are aware and give their consent, which makes it ethical. For the remaining IPs, they are sourced directly from ISPs.
Do We Recommend Oxylabs
Oxylabs is a household name in the proxy market and has proxies in all of the proxy categories. For its residential proxies, it is characterized by a large pool of IPs with an extensive location. The performance is superb and pricing affordable because of its pay-as-you-go option. For these reasons, we recommend the Oxylabs service, especially to mid-scale and large-scale proxy users.
The service requires its users to go through its KYC process which is strict and might not be worth it for small proxy users. In terms of usage recommendation, their residential proxies are recommended for web scraping tasks such as e-commerce scraping, marketing research, SEO monitoring, and other forms of scraping.
Alternatives to Oxylabs
While the Oxylabs service is one of the best residential proxy providers out there, it is not the best for everyone. If you need an alternative, make a choice from the below providers.
Bright Data — Best alternative to Oxylabs.
This is Oxylabs' number one contender and they have even faced legal battles in the past. The same similar proxy offering and pricing. However, while Oxylabs has a larger pool, it does have better performance in speed, a unique IP rate for web scraping, as well as has a high success rate. It is also an ethical provider and has web scraping as one of its main use cases.
Soax — Recommended for better precise geo-targeting.
Soax also has a large pool and extensive location support. One interesting about this service is that it provides you with granular location targeting support not just country level, but also state and cities. Its geo-targeting feature is more precise and accurate.
Smartproxy — Recommended for cheaper pricing.
The Smartproxy service is another alternative I will recommend, especially if you have smaller tasks to accomplish and you are looking for premium proxies at affordable pricing to get it done. The price GB here is $8.5 and the KYC procedure is a little relaxed compared to Oxylabs.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 9.2/10
9.2/10
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Proxy Network - 9.3/10
9.3/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.1/10
9.1/10
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Customer support - 9.2/10
9.2/10
Read other user reviews
Do not purchase. They block access to Google. Non of their proxies allow you to access Google. What's on earth proxy provider block access to Google, Gmail, etc.... I do not recommend their proxies! This is an arrogant proxy provider, Both their proxies and support are bad than Luminati...I do not know why they think they offer good proxies! Lots of IPs/proxies are blocked when I use proxies for google, and google store!
So, With slow speed oxylabs proxies and terrible support, so, Oxylabs proxies = "bad proxies".
Avoid!