Bright Data vs Oxylabs

Choosing between Bright Data and Oxylabs is one of the most common decisions teams face when picking a proxy and web data platform. Both are widely-cited leaders, both offer the full proxy stack plus scraping APIs and datasets, and both are now competing on AI/agent-ready infrastructure too. The market they operate in is growing fast: the global web scraping market is projected to reach USD 2.23 billion by 2031, up from USD 1.17 billion in 2026, a 13.78% CAGR according to Mordor Intelligence. This comparison goes deeper than the typical side-by-side: we cover the full product portfolios (including the newer AI products on both sides), pool sizes and geographic coverage, pricing per product, performance benchmarks, ethical sourcing, and which platform fits which use case best.

TL;DR: Bright Data vs Oxylabs at a Glance

A quick comparison of the two providers across the dimensions that matter most. Full per-product breakdowns follow in the sections below.

Company Overview

Before comparing products head-to-head, it helps to understand where each company comes from. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs were founded within a year of each other but grew up in very different ecosystems, one in Israel’s startup scene, the other inside a Lithuanian startup accelerator. Those origins still shape how each platform is sold and supported today.

Bright Data

Bright Data was founded in 2014 by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman, originally under the name Luminati Networks. The company rebranded to Bright Data in 2018 and is now the world’s largest web data platform, serving over 20,000 organizations including Fortune 500 companies, leading research institutions, and SMB teams. Headquartered in Israel, Bright Data has built one of the deepest product portfolios in the space, from raw proxies through no-code scraping browsers and structured datasets to agent-ready infrastructure like Web MCP and Agent Browser (covered in detail in the AI products section below). It is rated 4.6★ across 323+ verified G2 reviews and is the #1 listed proxy network on G2.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs was established in 2015 in Vilnius, Lithuania, born out of the Tesonet startup accelerator. Julius Černiauskas joined that same year and has led the company ever since, today serving as Chairman of the Board after the recent leadership restructure. Oxylabs grew from a 17-square-metre office to a global proxy and web scraping platform, repeatedly named among Europe’s fastest-growing data collection companies. It is best known for its premium residential proxy pool (175M+ IPs) and enterprise-focused Web Scraper API suite, and is rated 4.5★ across 414+ G2 reviews and 4.7★ on Trustpilot from over 1,100 reviewers.

Product Portfolio: Side-by-Side

A meaningful comparison has to go deeper than a single bullet list per side. Below we walk through every category of product both vendors offer, from each proxy type through scraping APIs, datasets, and the newer AI/agent products. Pricing for each product is summarized later in the Pricing Comparison section.

Datacenter Proxies

Bright Data’s datacenter proxies are the most cost-effective entry point for high-volume scraping of non-protected targets. The pool contains 1,300,000+ standard-compliant IPs across 98 countries, with unlimited concurrency and 99.99% uptime. Pricing starts at $1.40/IP for a 10-IP plan and drops to $0.90/IP at 1,000 IPs, with each IP including 100 GB of bandwidth per month under fair-use. For a deeper ranking against the broader market, see our best datacenter proxies post.

Oxylabs splits its datacenter offering into shared and dedicated tiers. The dedicated pool exceeds 2M private IPs across 188 countries starting at $50/month, while the shared tier covers 34 locations with unlimited bandwidth on fair-use terms. Pay-as-you-go pricing was added in the last year (currently from around $0.42/GB), closing what used to be a meaningful gap with Bright Data.

Residential Proxies

This is the product where the two companies are most directly comparable. Bright Data’s residential proxy network contains 400M+ ethically-sourced IPs across 195+ countries, with city, ASN, and carrier-level targeting and both rotating and sticky session options. Pricing tiers from $8/GB on pay-as-you-go down to $5/GB on the largest 798 GB / $1,999 monthly plan. Bright Data also runs an active RESIGB50 promo code that takes 50% off residential proxies for the first three months, dropping the effective pay-as-you-go rate to $4/GB and the top tier to $2.50/GB. For broader market context, see the best residential proxy providers ranking.

Oxylabs runs a 175M+ residential IP pool across 195 countries with similar targeting depth (country, city, state, ASN). Pricing on their main residential product starts at around $8/GB on standard plans, with enterprise tiers significantly lower per GB. Oxylabs is consistently praised for response speed (around 0.6s average) and has independently measured 99.82–99.95% success rates depending on the test methodology.

ISP Proxies (Static Residential)

For workflows that need a consistent IP per session (long-lived logins, sneaker copping, account management), both vendors offer ISP proxies (also called static residential). Bright Data’s ISP proxy network has 1,300,000+ datacenter-speed IPs sourced from real ISPs, with per-IP pricing from $1.80/IP at the 10-IP tier, dropping to $1.30/IP at 1,000 IPs. Oxylabs offers two ISP tiers: shared ISP from $1.60/IP (entry pool of 10+ IPs) and dedicated ISP from $3.20/IP. See best ISP proxies for the broader market view.

SERP API

Both vendors offer dedicated SERP scraping APIs that return parsed Google, Bing, Yandex, and other engine results in JSON. Bright Data’s SERP API is priced on a pay-per-success basis from $1.50 per 1,000 results, with no monthly commitment required, sub-1s delivery, and free geo-targeting at country/city/ZIP level. Oxylabs splits its SERP work into a dedicated SERP Scraper API, billed per result with volume-based discounts. Both products handle CAPTCHAs, geo-targeting, and structured JSON output. Bright Data’s edge is its broader engine coverage (including Naver, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and AI-Overview-aware Google SERPs).

Web Scraper API and Web Unlocker

Bright Data’s Web Scraper API is the highest-rated web scraping API available, with a 98.44% average success rate in Scrape.do’s independent benchmark of 11 providers , the highest score of any provider tested. It includes 120+ no-code scrapers for popular targets, pay-per-success pricing starting at $1.50 per 1,000 records, and a 1,000-request free trial. The companion Web Unlocker handles single-URL unblocking with CAPTCHA solving and JS rendering built in.

Oxylabs offers a similar split: the Web Scraper API for structured data and Web Unblocker for single-URL unlocking. Web Unblocker is priced per GB transferred (around $9.40/GB), which makes it more predictable for stable workloads but harder to model for spiky traffic. Oxylabs has historically led on response time (sub-0.6s) and has a strong reputation on heavily-protected travel and e-commerce targets.

Scraping Browser and Agent Browser

For workflows that need real browser execution, JavaScript-heavy SPAs, dynamic pricing, login flows , Bright Data ships a Playwright/Puppeteer-compatible Scraping Browser with built-in unblocking, plus a newer Agent Browser built specifically for AI agents that need to navigate, click, type, and reason about real DOMs (covered below). Oxylabs offers a similar headless browser product as part of its scraping suite; the main differences are pricing model (per-GB transferred on Oxylabs vs per-second / per-request on Bright Data) and the agent-specific tooling on the Bright Data side.

Datasets and Pre-collected Data

When you don’t want to run a scraper yourself, both vendors sell pre-collected and on-demand datasets. Bright Data’s Datasets catalog covers e-commerce, real estate, business firmographics, job listings, social data, and more, delivered in JSON, NDJSON, CSV, XLSX, or Parquet at agreed refresh cycles. Oxylabs runs a parallel Datasets product, currently with a smaller pre-made catalog but a strong custom-dataset practice. For the broader marketplace context, see our top data marketplaces ranking.

AI and Agent-Ready Products

This is the category that has changed the most between the original version of this comparison and today. Both vendors have invested heavily in agent-ready infrastructure, but the shape of those investments is quite different.

On the Bright Data side, three products stand out: Web MCP exposes the full Bright Data data stack (SERP, Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser, plus per-target connectors like Amazon, LinkedIn, Booking, Instagram, and 70+ others) over the Model Context Protocol so any MCP-compatible AI agent, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, ChatGPT, n8n, LangChain, can use it as a tool with no integration code. Agent Browser is a managed browser environment built for agents that need to actually click and type, not just fetch HTML. Agent Skills wraps the same capabilities as portable, reusable skill packages for agents that don’t natively speak MCP.

On the Oxylabs side, AI Studio is the headline product: a low-code, AI-powered data collection interface aimed at LLM developers and data engineers building intelligent applications that need clean, structured real-time web data. It overlaps significantly with Bright Data’s no-code Scraper API templates, but is positioned more as a build-on-top platform than as an agent integration layer. Oxylabs has not yet shipped a public MCP server or an agent-specific browser product, which means teams building MCP-native agents will find Bright Data the more direct fit today.

Proxy Pool Size and Geographic Coverage

Pool size and country coverage matter most when you’re scraping geo-locked content, doing local SEO monitoring, or managing many parallel sessions without overlap. Here’s how the two stack up across every proxy type.

Two notes on the numbers above: Bright Data’s IP-count cells use site-wide shortcodes that always render the current value, so they don’t drift as the pool grows. Oxylabs’ figures are pulled from their own product pages and product collateral as of May 2026.

Performance and Success Rates

Pool size is necessary but not sufficient, what matters is the share of requests that actually come back with the data you asked for. Anti-bot tooling has become non-optional: in 2024, automated traffic accounted for 51% of all internet traffic, the first time bots outnumbered humans, according to the Imperva Bad Bot Report. Independent benchmarks of how well each provider handles those defenses are the cleanest signal here.

In Scrape.do’s independent benchmark of 11 web scraping APIs, Bright Data achieved a 98.44% average success rate across the test set, the highest score of any provider evaluated. Oxylabs publishes a 99.95%+ success rate claim on its residential network from its own infrastructure testing, and CNET’s 2026 review independently confirmed strong reliability with a 99.9% uptime measurement. In practical terms: both vendors clear the 98% bar on most non-trivial targets; the gap shows up most noticeably on heavily-protected sites (e-commerce checkout flows, airline booking pages, social platforms with active anti-bot teams), where Bright Data’s Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser have an edge.

For more on how scraping APIs are evaluated, see the 9 best web scraping APIs.

Ethical IP Sourcing

With residential pools in the hundreds of millions of IPs, how those IPs were acquired matters, both ethically and legally. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs run on opt-in, bandwidth-sharing programs with transparent user consent. The mechanics differ slightly.

Bright Data sources residential IPs through several consent-based channels: the EarnApp (users opt in to share unused bandwidth in exchange for monetary rewards), Bright VPN (free VPN whose users contribute idle bandwidth), the Piggy Box (physical devices like Raspberry Pis that join the network), and an embedded SDK that developers can integrate into apps with explicit user opt-in. Bright Data publishes a public KYC compliance review process for enterprise customers and was one of the first proxy networks to be EWDCI-certified.

Oxylabs sources its residential pool primarily through Honeygain, the long-standing bandwidth-sharing program. Like Bright Data, all IPs are obtained from users who voluntarily opt in to share their bandwidth in exchange for compensation. Oxylabs is also a public member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative and publishes annual impact reports detailing its compliance practices.

Both vendors meet the bar for “ethically sourced” in the strict sense (opt-in, consent-based, compensated). The choice between them on ethical grounds usually comes down to specific compliance requirements your legal team flags, both publish enough documentation to feed into a vendor review.

Pricing Comparison by Product

Both vendors publish public pricing for their proxy products and have moved toward more granular per-product pricing pages. The table below summarizes entry-level rates for each major product category as verified in May 2026. Enterprise contracts can drive these numbers significantly lower; what’s shown here are the lowest publicly-listed starting rates.

For deep pricing tables across all proxy products, both vendors expose dedicated pricing pages: Bright Data’s proxy pricing hub and the equivalent Oxylabs pricing page.

Documentation and Developer Resources

For a developer evaluating a proxy or scraping platform, the quality of the docs, SDKs, and integration guides often makes the difference between a 30-minute proof of concept and a multi-day evaluation.

Bright Data publishes its developer documentation at docs.brightdata.com with API references, CLI documentation, integration guides for popular agent frameworks (Claude, Cursor, LangChain, LlamaIndex, n8n, CrewAI, OpenAI, and many more), and per-target MCP server documentation. The broader content hub includes the Bright Data Blog (with the comparison, proxy-101, and AI sub-categories), a Web Data Masterclass, webinars, and the Data for AI Report.

Oxylabs publishes a documentation portal alongside its blog, an active series of webinars and conferences, a podcast, white papers, and dedicated solution pages. Documentation depth on the core proxy products is strong; the gap shows up most on agent and MCP integration where Bright Data has materially more reference material.

Customer Base and Reviews

Customer count and third-party review platforms are imperfect signals but useful as a sanity check on the marketing narrative each vendor tells about itself. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs publish customer-count numbers and link to G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and PCMag reviews.

• Bright Data: over 20,000 customers including Fortune 500 enterprises and leading research institutions. G2: 4.6★ across 323+ verified reviews. Capterra and other syndicated review sites carry comparable ratings. Bright Data was named the #1 proxy network on the G2 Spring 2026 Enterprise Grid.
• Oxylabs: large enterprise customer base concentrated in EU SaaS, e-commerce intelligence, and travel-data verticals. G2: 4.5★ across 414+ verified reviews. Trustpilot: 4.7★ across 1,100+ reviews. PCMag named Oxylabs the Best Proxy Service of 2026 in its enterprise category.

In short: both vendors are well-reviewed by paying customers. The gap on G2 review volume favors Bright Data, but Oxylabs has a higher Trustpilot review count from a broader user base.

Bright Data vs Oxylabs: Final Verdict and Use-Case Fit

After a head-to-head walk through every product, the right answer is rarely “always pick X”, it depends on what you’re building. Here is how the choice usually breaks down in practice.

Pick Bright Data if…

• You’re building AI agents or LLM applications that need web data, the Web MCP, Agent Browser, and Agent Skills story is the most developed in the market today.
• You need the highest possible success rate on heavily-protected targets, the 98.44% Scrape.do benchmark result is the highest of any provider tested.
• You want pay-as-you-go pricing across every product, with no monthly commitment.
• You’re an SMB or startup, Bright Data caters to teams of any size, with self-serve onboarding.
• You need the broadest product portfolio in one place (proxies + scraping APIs + datasets + agent tooling).

Pick Oxylabs if…

• You’re an EU-based enterprise with a strong preference for working with EU vendors.
• You value sub-0.6s response time on residential proxies, Oxylabs has independently measured among the fastest in the market.
• You want a low-code, AI-assisted data-collection studio for non-engineer users, Oxylabs’ AI Studio is positioned for this use case.
• Your scraping workloads have stable, predictable GB throughput, the per-GB pricing model is easier to forecast at consistent volumes.

Related Reading

• Bright Data vs Firecrawl: the AI-focused comparison.
• Bright Data vs Exa: semantic search and discovery API head-to-head.
• Bright Data vs NetNut: deep comparison against another major proxy provider.
• IPRoyal vs Bright Data: another proxy-ecosystem head-to-head.
• Smartproxy vs Bright Data: covers the recent Smartproxy → Decodo rebrand.
• SOAX vs Bright Data: how SOAX’s narrower scope compares.

Conclusion

Bright Data and Oxylabs are both excellent web data platforms, and the right answer depends on which side of the trade-offs above matters most to your team. For most use cases, especially anything AI-agent-related, anything that requires the broadest set of products in one platform, or anything that needs pay-as-you-go billing on every product, Bright Data is the more flexible choice. For EU-based enterprise teams running stable, predictable web data workloads on standard targets, Oxylabs remains a strong fit.

You can get started with Bright Data on a 7-day free trial (no credit card required) or talk to our sales team about a custom enterprise setup.