Oxylabs Proxy Service Review | technological radar

Oxylabs Proxy Service Review | technological radar

If you have the idea that there are many proxy vendors in a very gray area, you are probably right. However, Oxylabs does its best to explain exactly how it differs: this Lithuania-based distributor only operates in a legal white zone.

For example, the company has a huge set of 102 million proxies in 195 countries around the world, but you no longer wonder where they come from. The website boasts that they are ethically sourced "from vetted vendors who have a strict obligation to notify end users of their involvement with a proxy network and obtain their consent."

Instead of focusing on small-scale Ticketmaster or sneaker proxies, Oxylabs offers its service for large business use cases such as ad verification, brand protection, and SEO monitoring.

And while smaller providers cross their fingers and hope to deliver what they promise, Oxylabs only uses certified data centers and upstream providers, and their plans are even insured by Lloyds. ​Insurances', if you're curious.)

Pricing

(Image credit: Oxylabs)

packages and prices

Oxylabs has a fairly broad product portfolio that includes home, data center, mobile, ISP, and SOCKS5 proxies.

You can also opt for general purpose API, search engine or eCommerce scraper. There's even a Next Generation Home Proxies plan that leverages AI and machine learning to ensure a 100% success rate. (We haven't tested this, but Oxylabs claims that it uses CAPTCHA handling, adaptive HTML parsing, dynamic fingerprinting, and JavaScript rendering to automatically retry if something goes wrong.

Oxylabs data center proxies start at €180/month for 100 data center IP addresses in the US (60 rest of the world), or €1,8/IP. The cost drops to €6,000/IP with their €5,000/month premium plan that includes 2,500 US IPs (XNUMX rest of the world).

Residential proxies start at €300/month and offer 20 GB of bandwidth, or €15/GB. At the other end of the spectrum, you'll get 1TB for €5,000/month, which translates to just €5/GB.

The cheapest residential proxy plans can be purchased online, allowing you to start using the service right away. But most require you to contact the sales department, where you speak with a representative about your exact needs.

If you're not ready to commit yet (and we don't blame you, with those high starting prices), talk to the company anyway. Free trials are available upon request.

Features

Oxylabs charges above average prices, but check out the list of features and it's easy to see why. Their products are designed for large-scale projects, with some of the limitations you'll find elsewhere.

There are no restrictions on concurrent sessions, for example, nor are you charged extra. Just do what you need to do, and Oxylabs should be able to handle it.

Geographic targeting allows you to work at the country, state, or city level for maximum flexibility. Compare that to the extreme budget end of the market, where, for example, some Storm Proxies plans only have two targeting options, US and EU, and you can see what you're paying for.

There are also no set limits for subnets. The company claims that if you buy 1000 proxies (for example), you can typically have between 4 and 1000 subnets, "depending on your business needs."

Authentication

(Image credit: Oxylabs)

There is support for authenticating proxy access by username and password or a trusted IP address. Some providers limit you to a set number of IP addresses (sometimes you are only allowed one). Oxylabs not only allows you to add as many specific IP addresses as you need, you can also add ranges (192.168.1.0/24).

Regardless of how your queries are configured, Oxylabs ensures excellent performance, with an average success rate of 99,2% and a proxy speed of 0,6s.

We don't have space to talk about Oxylabs web scraping IPs, but they are just as comprehensive as the rest of the service. The SERP Scraper API targets cities in XNUMX countries, extracts the precise data points you need from all kinds of search engine pages, and delivers them in CSV or JSON format.

You can even decide where to store your data, if standard S3 or Google Cloud storage isn't right for you – now you're really flexible.

Dashboard

(Image credit: Oxylabs)

Use of Oxylabs

Purchase an Oxylabs plan, sign in to your new account, and you'll be taken to the company's web-based control panel, your one-stop proxy management center.

There's more to learn and do here than with most competitors, but for good reason: as we've seen, Oxylabs has far more features than any other.

subuser

(Image credit: Oxylabs)

During startup, for example, you are prompted to create one or more sub-users to help you manage your projects. It's not just about authentication via username and password: you can also choose to limit the traffic that a particular sub-user can consume, a convenient way to manage your bandwidth allocation.

Statistics

(Image credit: Oxylabs)

It is similar in other parts of the board; Oxylabs doesn't do anything particularly complicated, it just gives you extra options that we rarely see elsewhere. While regular proxy lists only come in plain text, Oxylabs can display them in JSON, for example. And a statistics page shows you how your projects are performing in great detail, including destination domains, traffic used, number of requests, errors, and more.

A knowledge base covers everything you need to know, from dashboard basics to more advanced options to help you customize the service to your exact needs.

The integrations page has helpful tutorials on working with Jarvee, Octoparse, Puppeteer, and many other XNUMXrd party tools, for example, and more technical documentation for developers https://developers.oxylabs.io/residential-proxies/#quick-el start is excellent.

However, if you need more, Oxylabs offers 24/7 live chat (we got helpful answers within minutes), and you can create a ticket, send an email, or just talk to your account manager. . Others claim to have "premium" support, but Oxylabs actually provides it, and it's great to have that level of resources available when running a proxy-heavy project.

final verdict

Oxylabs is a premium service at a premium price, and its high startup costs, bandwidth costs, and steeper-than-average learning curve mean it's overkill for most small-scale freelance projects. But if you need a premium provider and will make good use of its many features, then Oxylabs should be at the top of your short list of proxy vendors.

We have also pointed out the best proxy and the best VPN.