4 Best Oxylabs Alternatives for Developers and Data Teams

TL;DR: Oxylabs is a proxy-first data company that launched an AI-focused Web API in October 2026. Here are 4 alternatives worth considering:

• Firecrawl: gives AI agents web data and beyond, with web search that returns full pages, LLM-ready scraping, Firecrawl Alexandria for data providers and indexes, and Monitor for change alerts
• Bright Data: the broadest proxy, scraper, and dataset catalog, with a monthly free tier
• IPRoyal: unlimited datacenter bandwidth for fully predictable costs
• ScrapingBee: simple request-based plans from $19/mo with browser actions built in

Oxylabs spent a decade selling proxies to enterprises, and in October 2026 it repositioned around AI agents with a new Web API, which puts it up against AI-focused web data APIs as well as other proxy providers.

Oxylabs is a Vilnius-based proxy and web data provider founded in 2015. Its core business is a proxy network of 177M+ IPs across 195 locations, covering residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies. In October 2026 it joined Source, a newly formed group valued at $3.6B that also owns Decodo, Webshare, and ScrapingBee. Each brand still operates independently.

Its flagship product is now Web API, launched October 7, 2026, with two endpoints:

• Search (/v1/search): live web search that returns up to 20 ranked results per query, each with a title, URL, and a short SERP snippet. It doesn't return page content, so you pass each URL to the scrape endpoint to read it.
• Scrape (/v1/scrape): fetches one URL as HTML (the default), Markdown, JSON, or a screenshot, with optional JavaScript rendering and country-level geotargeting. It also exposes about 70 dedicated scrapers for Google, Amazon, YouTube, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and major retailers.

Web API ships with a self-hosted MCP server and Agent Skills for coding agents. Around it, Oxylabs sells Web Unblocker (a proxy endpoint that handles retries and rendering), Agent Browser (a hosted browser for Playwright and Puppeteer), video datasets, and AI Studio, a separate natural-language product that holds its crawl and site-mapping tools.

Pricing moved to a single subscription in October 2026: $5 in free credits, then plans at $30, $100, $500, and $2,500+ per month. Search costs $1 per 1,000 queries. Scrape rates depend on the target, from $0.25 per 1,000 results for simple pages at enterprise volume up to $1.50 per 1,000 for JavaScript-rendered custom domains on Starter. AI parsing into JSON adds $3 per 1,000 pages. Residential proxies run $6/GB on Starter, dropping to $2.50/GB at the top tier.

A few Oxylabs users on G2 have complained about these drawbacks:

• Cost at volume. Pricing climbs quickly as usage grows, and it's not the cheapest option for smaller teams.
• Bandwidth burn. Proxy usage eats through bandwidth faster than expected, which adds up on per-GB billing.
• Fiddly targeting. Precise geo and filtering options take trial and error to set up.
• Slow support outside business hours. Response times depend on the time of day.
• Onboarding friction. Account verification can delay the start by about a day.

Firecrawl covers the AI web data side, while Bright Data, IPRoyal, and ScrapingBee sit closer to Oxylabs' proxy and scraping API roots. For a broader comparison across all major web scraping APIs, see our best web scraping APIs guide.

Firecrawl gives AI agents web data and beyond: one API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale, plus official data providers and Firecrawl's own indexes through Firecrawl Alexandria. Where Oxylabs sells proxies and adds scraping on top, Firecrawl starts from the output an AI agent needs: find the right sources, turn them into clean Markdown or structured data, and keep them current. Over a million developers and thousands of enterprise teams use it to get web data into their AI applications.

One API family covers the whole workflow. Search finds sources on the live web, Scrape and Parse turn pages and PDFs into clean data, Interact handles clicks, forms, and logins, Agent gathers data across sites, Crawl and Map go deep on a domain, Firecrawl Alexandria reaches data providers and indexes, and Monitor watches for changes.

Search is the front door

An agent has to find the right page before it can use it. Oxylabs' search endpoint returns up to 20 links with truncated snippets, and you pay for a separate scrape on every result you want to read. Firecrawl Search returns ranked results from the live web with the excerpts that best answer the query, and the same call can return each result as full-page Markdown. Agents using /search scored 94.7% on SimpleQA in our benchmark while using 10x fewer tokens than processing full pages.

Scrape works on the real web

Firecrawl Scrape turns any URL into clean Markdown or structured data, including JavaScript-heavy pages, single-page apps, and lazy-loaded content. Output comes back token-efficient by default, so your agent reasons over content instead of navigation and ads. When you only need part of a page, the question and highlights formats return a grounded answer or the exact matching passages instead of the full page. For pages that need clicks, forms, or logins, Interact runs the same request in a real browser.

Enhanced mode: proxies handled for you, at no extra cost

With Oxylabs you choose and pay for proxy types yourself, from $6/GB for residential on Starter, and harder pages push you toward pricier products like Web Unblocker. Firecrawl picks the proxy for you. In the default auto mode, each request starts on basic proxies and, if the site answers with a 401, 403, or 429, retries once through enhanced proxies within the same request. Enhanced requests cost the same 1 credit as basic ones, and the retry isn't charged separately.

Firecrawl Alexandria: one library for the data a scraper can't reach

Oxylabs' answer to hard-to-reach data is a dedicated scraper per site. Firecrawl Alexandria brings official data providers (such as Wikimedia Enterprise), custom connectors, and Firecrawl's own Research, Developer, and Government indexes together with the live web. Your agent discovers sources in a search request and pulls from the one it needs through the same API, and providers are paid under agreement when their data is used. Across 845 tasks, agents using Firecrawl Alexandria scored 21% higher on answer quality than agents using built-in web tools (launch post).

Monitor: know when the web changes

Oxylabs doesn't document a change-detection product. Its Classic API can schedule scrapes, but you'd build the snapshot storage and diffing yourself. Firecrawl /monitor checks pages or whole sites on a schedule (every 5 minutes, hourly, daily, or custom cron) and sends a signed webhook or email with a structured diff only when something changes, using up to 90% fewer LLM tokens than rescraping. Web-scale /monitor runs search queries on a schedule instead and alerts you when new, relevant pages appear anywhere on the web.

Agent: autonomous research from one prompt

For jobs that start with a question instead of a URL, Firecrawl /agent takes a plain-English prompt (and an optional schema), then searches, navigates, and extracts across as many sites as it needs to return structured data. It runs on Spark 2, a model built for structured web research, so you don't write a crawler or chain search and scrape calls yourself. Oxylabs' closest equivalent, Browser Agent, lives in AI Studio with its own account and credit system.

Use it inside ChatGPT and Claude

Firecrawl is an official ChatGPT plugin and a Claude connector, so you can run web searches with full page content, scrape and crawl sites, interact with dynamic pages, monitor for changes, and pull from Firecrawl Alexandria providers without leaving the chat. Developers get the same tools in Claude Code through the official Claude plugin, and in Cursor, Codex, and other agents through the hosted MCP server and CLI.

Fewer vendors to manage

Teams running proxies, a scraping API, a search API, and a home-grown monitoring layer from different vendors can move all of it to Firecrawl, with one API key, one output format, one credit balance, and one compliance posture (SOC 2 Type 2, plus zero data retention for regulated workloads).

Alex Reibman shared on X why his team switched:

Moved our internal agent’s web scraping tool from Apify to Firecrawl because it benchmarked 50x faster with AgentOps

• Search: Live web results with relevant excerpts or full page content in one call
• Scrape: Clean Markdown, JSON, summaries, answers, or highlights from any URL, including JavaScript-heavy pages
• Interact: Clicks, forms, logins, and dynamic pages in a real browser
• Enhanced mode: Automatic proxy selection that escalates to enhanced proxies when a site refuses the request, at the same 1-credit price
• Firecrawl Alexandria: Official data providers and Firecrawl's Research, Developer, and Government indexes through one API
• Monitor: Scheduled change detection on pages, sites, or web-wide searches, delivered by webhook or email
• Agent: Autonomous research from a single prompt, returning structured data across many sites
• Crawl, Map, and Parse: Whole-site extraction, URL discovery, and PDF and document parsing
• ChatGPT and Claude: Official ChatGPT plugin, Claude connector, and Claude Code plugin
• Developer surfaces: Hosted MCP server, CLI, Skills, and SDKs for Python, Node, and more
• No-code integrations: Works with Lovable, n8n, Zapier, and Make

Start free with Firecrawl Keyless. Keyless lets you search, scrape, and interact with the web without an API key or an account, with 1,000 free credits a month applied automatically. Point any MCP-compatible tool at https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp or run npx firecrawl-cli@latest, and it works immediately. Oxylabs, by comparison, requires an account (and account verification) before you can spend its $5 trial credits.

Paid plans start with Hobby at $19/month billed monthly for 5,000 credits (pricing). Every endpoint draws from the same credit balance, so there's no separate price list per target.

Choose Firecrawl if you're building an AI agent or data pipeline and want clean web data rather than raw proxy infrastructure. It fits teams that need search, scraping, licensed data, and change alerts from one API key, instead of stitching together Oxylabs' Web API, AI Studio, and a home-grown monitoring stack.

Bright Data is the closest like-for-like alternative to Oxylabs: an enterprise proxy company that has grown into scraping APIs, pre-built scrapers, and datasets, and now markets heavily to AI agents. It claims 400M+ proxy IPs across 195 countries and 50,000+ customers.

More free usage and a hosted MCP server

Bright Data's free tier renews every month with 5,000 credits shared across its Unlocker, SERP, scraper, and browser products, and its hosted MCP server draws from the same pool. Oxylabs offers a one-time $5 credit and a self-hosted MCP server.

Crawl and search under the same account

Unlike Oxylabs' Web API, Bright Data has a Crawl API that returns a whole site as Markdown or JSON, and a SERP API covering Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo, and Naver. Unlocker and SERP requests are billed only when they succeed.

• Proxy network: Residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies with targeting down to city, zip, and ASN
• Unlocker API: One request that handles proxy selection, retries, and rendering
• Browser API: Hosted browsers for Playwright, Puppeteer, and Selenium, billed per GB
• Web Scraper API and Scraper Studio: Pre-built scrapers for named sites, plus a builder for custom ones
• Dataset Marketplace and Web Archive: Pre-collected records and cached page snapshots
• Agent tooling: Hosted MCP server, CLI, and Python and JavaScript SDKs

Bright Data holds a 4.7 on G2 and a 4.4 on Trustpilot, where support speed is the most common praise. A few users have complained about these drawbacks:

• Price. Reviewers say it costs more than rival providers at the same volume.
• Support escalation. Some users say the AI support assistant doesn't hand tickets to a human quickly enough.
• Coverage requests. There's no clear way to ask for a scraper for a site Bright Data doesn't cover yet.

• Markdown is opt-in. The Unlocker API returns raw HTML unless you ask for Markdown, and the SERP API returns results pages without the content behind each result.
• Fragmented setup and pricing. Each product needs its own zone and bills in its own unit (per request, per record, per page load, per GB, or per IP), and there's no paid API plan between the free tier and $499/mo.
• No structured extraction from arbitrary pages in one call. Structured JSON means a pre-built scraper, a custom one in Scraper Studio, or the MCP extract tool.
• Browser actions need a separate product. The Unlocker API can't click or type, so those jobs move to the per-GB Browser API.

Consider Bright Data if you want an enterprise proxy and data vendor like Oxylabs but with a monthly free tier, a hosted MCP server, a crawl API, and a large catalog of pre-built scrapers and datasets. For a deeper comparison, see the Bright Data alternatives guide.

IPRoyal sells datacenter proxies at a flat per-IP rate with unlimited bandwidth, so the bill doesn't change with usage.

Unlimited bandwidth for predictable costs

At $1.57 per IP per month with unlimited bandwidth, high-volume datacenter scraping carries no overage charges.

For residential proxies, IPRoyal charges $7/GB, which is more than Oxylabs' $6/GB Starter rate, so the case for IPRoyal rests on its datacenter plans.

Solid performance for ecommerce scraping

In our testing, IPRoyal delivered consistent success on Shopify, Footsites, and standard ecommerce sites.

• 32M+ residential IPs: Smaller pool but adequate for most use cases
• Unlimited datacenter bandwidth: Flat per-IP pricing with no overage fees
• Multiple proxy types: Residential, datacenter, mobile, and US ISP
• Good ecommerce performance: Reliable on commercial platforms

IPRoyal users on Trustpilot highlight service reliability and support quality:

Trustpilot:

I've been a customer of this site for a long time, and all its services are reliable and of high quality. I haven't encountered any problems, and the customer service is excellent.

Trustpilot:

Great service. Great support. Highly recommended.

Consider IPRoyal if cost predictability is your top priority, for example a budget-conscious team running high-volume datacenter proxy jobs that has to forecast spend each month.

ScrapingBee is a developer-focused scraping API that wraps proxies and a headless browser behind one endpoint, with add-on APIs for Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Amazon, Walmart, and YouTube. ScrapingBee belongs to the same company as Oxylabs. Oxylabs acquired it in 2025, and since October 2026 both sit under the parent company Source. It still runs as a separate product with its own pricing, aimed at smaller teams that want a simple monthly plan instead of an enterprise proxy contract.

Plans priced by request, not bandwidth

ScrapingBee sells monthly credit bundles with concurrency included: Hobby at $19/mo (75,000 credits), Freelance at $49/mo (250,000 credits, 50 concurrent requests), Startup at $99/mo (1,000,000 credits), and Business at $249/mo (3,000,000 credits), with enterprise tiers above that (pricing). Concurrency limits went up across plans in October 2026. There's no per-GB proxy line to forecast.

Browser actions and Auto-Mode

JavaScript scenarios let you click, scroll, fill forms, and wait for elements before the page is captured, all in one request. Auto-Mode tries the cheapest configuration first, escalates only when it has to, and charges for the configuration that worked (nothing if every attempt fails).

• Single scraping endpoint with JavaScript rendering on by default, premium proxy tiers, geotargeting, and screenshots
• AI extraction with plain-English queries or extraction rules (5 extra credits), plus CSS and XPath selectors
• Dedicated APIs for Google, Fast Search, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, ChatGPT, Gemini, and employee search
• Developer tooling: hosted MCP server, CLI, Python and Node SDKs, and n8n, Make, and Zapier integrations

ScrapingBee holds a 4.8 on G2 and a 4.9 on Capterra, with support as the most common theme. One small-business owner on G2 called it "reliable and fast," and a Capterra reviewer wrote that "customer service is truly responsive."

• Credit costs swing widely. The default request costs 5 credits because JavaScript rendering is on, premium proxies with JavaScript cost 25, the strongest proxy tier costs 75, and AI extraction adds 5 more (credit costs). On harder sites, Hobby's 75,000 credits can cover as few as 1,000 pages. A few users have said the credit system is hard to predict and costs climb quickly at volume.
• No free tier. The 1,000 credits are a one-time trial.
• Single-page by design. There's no hosted crawl or map API, and Fast Search returns links without page content, so multi-page and research workflows need extra code.
• No agent, monitoring, or licensed data layer comparable to Firecrawl's /agent, /monitor, or Firecrawl Alexandria.

Consider ScrapingBee if you're a small team or solo developer who wants a low monthly entry price, browser actions in the same request, and plans priced by request rather than bandwidth, and you're comfortable staying within the same corporate group as Oxylabs. For a broader look at ScrapingBee against other scraping APIs, see the ScrapingBee alternatives guide.

If you want proxy infrastructure in the Oxylabs mold, Bright Data is the closest enterprise equivalent, IPRoyal makes datacenter costs predictable, and ScrapingBee is the simplest entry point for a small team.

Oxylabs is a proxy company first. Its new Web API brings it closer to AI use cases, but search, scraping, crawling, and structured extraction still sit across different products and price lines. If you want clean web data for an AI agent from one API, Firecrawl gives you web search that returns full pages, scraping with markdown by default, Firecrawl Alexandria for official data providers and indexes, and Monitor to know when any of it changes.

You can try it now with Firecrawl Keyless, which needs no API key or account and includes 1,000 free credits a month. Run npx firecrawl-cli@latest or point your MCP client at https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp.