Bright Data vs Oxylabs

Both providers offer large proxy pools and their proxies are renowned for being fast and reliable.

In this article we will provide a detailed comparison of Bright Data and Oxylabs, covering various aspects such as:

1. Customer Base
2. Ratings
3. Product Offerings
4. Proxy Pool Size
5. Pricing

Understanding these aspects will enable you to make a well-informed decision about which proxy provider to choose based on your needs.

Bright Data and Oxylabs – Quick Summary

Here’s a brief comparison of the main aspects of both companies:

Both Bright Data and Oxylabs are excellent choices, but Bright Data often comes out as the preferred choice for most users, due to its:

• Trust among 20,000+ Customers and Fortune 500 Companies
• Rich Ecosystem of web scraping related tools
• Wealth of educational resources in the form of a Blog, Web Data Masterclass, and Webinars
• Ability to cater to businesses of all sizes and budgets

With these key points in mind, let’s take a closer look at the various aspects related to Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Customer Base and Reviews

The number of customers a company serves is a solid indicator of the quality of its products and services.

Both Bright Data and Oxylabs have a significant number of customers. However, Bright Data has a larger customer base with over 20,000 customers compared to Oxylabs’ 2,000 customers, primarily because it caters to businesses of all sizes and budgets.

Bright Data also excels in G2 Ratings, ranking #1 in the Proxy Network Category with a stellar 4.7-star rating from 139 customers. It has three times as many reviews as Oxylabs on G2, indicating a strong customer preference for Bright Data as its go-to proxy solution.

Proxy Pool Size

A sizable proxy pool reduces the chances of IP reuse, making requests less detectable and increasing the success rate of your scraping operations.

Bright Data has the second-largest proxy pool in the world, offering a diverse range of proxies including:

• Datacenter proxies – Over 770,000 datacenter IPs
• Residential proxies – Over 72M residential IPs
• ISP proxies – Over 700,000 ISP IPs
• Mobile proxies – Over 7M mobile IP

However, when it comes to the size of the proxy network, Oxylabs controls the largest proxy pool globally, including:

• Datacenter proxies – Over 2M datacenter IPs
• Residential proxies – Over 100M residential IPs
• Mobile proxies – Over 20M mobile IPs

That being said, both Bright Data and Oxylabs have extensive proxy pools, ensuring the uniqueness of requests and enhancing the effectiveness of web scraping operations.

Ethical IP Sourcing

With millions of IP addresses under their belt, Bright Data and Oxylabs have extensive proxy networks. But how do they procure such proxy massive pools?

Both Bright Data and Oxylabs employ ethical methods to acquire their proxies, emphasizing transparency and user consent.

According to an interview Proxyway conducted with the CEO of Bright Data, the company uses various methods to procure proxies ethically such as:

1. Earn App: Users voluntarily join the proxy network, sharing unused computing resources in exchange for monetary rewards.
2. Bright VPN: Users voluntarily contribute their idle bandwidth to become part of the Network.
3. Piggy Box: Physical devices like Raspberry Pi connect to the network, thereby growing the proxy pool.
4. Embedded SDK: Developers integrate the SDK into applications, and users are aware of their participation in the proxy network.

Similarly, Oxylabs sources its proxies ethically, as highlighted in an interview with the Head of Risk Management at Oxylabs. The company primarily obtains proxies through Honeygain, where users voluntarily opt-in to share their internet bandwidth in exchange for rewards, thereby contributing to Oxylabs’ proxy pool.

Both Oxylabs and Bright Data practice ethical proxy collection, acquiring IP addresses solely from people who have agreed to participate in the bandwidth-sharing programs. This ensures people’s privacy is protected, and that they are not being taken advantage of.

Products

Choosing a provider that offers a comprehensive suite of products can simplify your web scraping efforts, eliminating the need to juggle multiple tools from different providers. Let’s take a look at the products offered by Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Bright Data offers the following suite of products:

1. Proxy Networks: Access a large pool of data center, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies for efficient web scraping.
2. SERP APIs: SERP APIs allow you to collect parsed search engine results in JSON formats from search engines like Google, Bing, and many more.
3. Web Scraping Browser: This Playwright/Puppeteer-compatible scraping browser features built-in website unlocking features.
4. Web Scraper IDE: Use Javascript functions and existing code templates to build web scrapers
5. Web Scraper API: Access structured web data programmatically with ease, featuring 99.99% uptime and unlimited scalability.
6. Web Unlocker: It automates the unlocking of even the toughest websites, achieving unprecedented success rates.
7. Datasets: Purchase ready-made, large, and accurate datasets including business, real estate, eCommerce datasets, and more.

Oxylabs, on the other hand, offers the following products:

1. Proxy Networks: The Largest pool of datacenter proxies, residential proxies, and mobile proxies.
2. Web Scraping APIs: Ready made scraping API to scrape popular search engines, e-commerce, and real estate websites.
3. Datasets: Although the pre-made options are currently limited, there are also custom dataset.

Bright Data’s rich product ecosystem eliminates the need for using multiple tools to achieve your web scraping goals. Due to its comprehensive ecosystem, Proxyway awarded Bright Data with the Best Proxy Ecosystem Award 2021 and Best Tools for Data Collection Award 2022.

Educational Resources

Let’s explore the educational resources created by Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Bright Data is dedicated to creating content that serves the web scraping community. They publish insightful blogs on a variety of practical topics, such as:

• Techniques for scraping different websites like Twitter and Reddit
• Tutorials on scraping using Puppeteer
• Strategies for bypassing IP bans and many more …

Bright Data also offers a web data masterclass featuring content from leading YouTube channels, like Fireship, that focus on web scraping. You can find all their masterclasses here.

In addition, Bright Data hosts webinars aimed at providing solutions to common problems encountered by web scrapers. All their webinars can be found here.

Oxylabs also produces content targeted at the web scraping community, primarily through their blog. Their content includes how-to guides, product updates, and many more.

Pricing

Bright Data and Oxylabs are reputed premium Proxy Providers in the market. We will now explore the pricing of both providers to better understand the costs involved.

It’s important to note that both providers offer various pricing plans. However, for the sake of simplicity, we are focusing on their starting prices only.

Bright Data’s pricing is as follows:

• Residential: $10.5/GB. Pay as you Go.
• Datacenter: $0.110 ($0.80/IP + $0.11/GB). Pay as you Go.
• ISP: $15/GB. Pay as you Go.
• Mobile: $24/GB. Pay as you Go.

On the other hand, Oxylabs’ pricing is as follows:

• Residential: $10/GB. Pay as you Go.
• Datacenter: $0.65/GB. Plan Based ($50/77GB).
• ISP: $17/GB. Pay as you Go.
• Mobile: $22/GB. Pay as you Go.

The pricing of both providers is competitive, with similar rates across the board. However, there are some key differences that make Bright Data a more attractive choice for certain users.

Specifically, Bright Data offers a convenient pay-as-you-go plan for data center proxies, this feature is not provided by Oxylabs, making Bright Data a more attractive option for users requiring smaller amounts of data center GBs.

In the area of subscription management, Bright Data again takes the lead. It allows self-service for all of its products, except for datasets. On the other hand, Oxylabs only supports self-service for residential proxies and rotating data center proxies and Scraper API. For all other products, Oxylabs customers are required to contact customer service.

Both proxy providers allow geo-targeting by country, state, city, and zip code, enabling users to bypass geo-restricted websites.

Also, For those looking to try before buying, both Bright Data and Oxylabs offer free trials to test their services without risk.

Finally, a pro tip for web scrapers: Proxies are generally expensive so to save costs on proxies, consider disabling images, stylesheets, and fonts when web scraping.

Conclusion

Throughout this discussion, we’ve taken a detailed look at various features offered by both Bright Data and Oxylabs. Based on our analysis, Bright Data stands out as the best option due to the following reasons:

• Bright Data is the trusted solution for over 20K customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.
• Bright Data holds the #1 spot in the G2 rankings for the Proxy Network Category.
• It was the winner of both the Best Proxy Ecosystem Award in 2021 and the Best Tools for Data Collection Award in 2022, thanks to its rich ecosystem of products.
• Bright Data offers a wealth of educational resources, including a Blog, Web Data Masterclass, and Webinars to guide users on their data journey.
• It caters to businesses of all sizes and budgets.

Before settling on a proxy provider, it’s important to try out various services. Therefore, we encourage you to take the free trial offered by Bright Data to experience its quality firsthand and understand why over 20K customers, including Fortune 500 companies, choose Bright Data.