Oxylabs Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more

The Lithuanian-based proxy service, Oxylabs has been in this business since 2015. The service has over 100 million proxies spread out in 195 countries around the world. On their website, the company takes pride in that they’re ethically sourced 'from vetted suppliers that are under strict obligations to inform end-users about their participation in a proxy network and acquire consent from them.'

Oxylabs focuses on meeting business needs (as opposed to stuff like sneaker proxies), like brand protection, ad verification, or SEO monitoring.

And while small providers leave you crossing your fingers and hoping they deliver what they promise, Oxylabs uses only certified data centers and upstream providers, and its plans are even insured by Lloyds (that's coverage for 'Technology Errors & Omissions (Technology E&O) and Cyber insurance', if you're curious.)

Oxylabs: Plans and pricing

Oxylabs has a rather large portfolio of products that includes residential, data center, mobile, rotating ISP and SOCKS5 proxies.

You can also opt for general purpose search engine or e-commerce scraper APIs. There's even a Web Unblocker plan which leverages AI and machine learning for a high success rate. Oxylabs claims it has ‘Human like browsing’ to bypass CAPTCHA’s, has adaptive HTML parsing, dynamic fingerprinting and JavaScript rendering to automatically retry if it runs into any problems.

Oxylabs’ dedicated datacenter proxies start at $180/month for your choice of 100 US datacenter IPs, or60 in the rest of world, which works out to $1.8/IP. The cost comes down with higher tiered plans, such as to $1.2/IP with its top-end $6000/month plan that includes 5000 US IPs, or2500 in the rest of the world.

Residential proxy plans start at $99/month and offer 11 GB of bandwidth, which comes to $9/GB. At the other end of the residential proxy spectrum, there are plans more suited for Enterprises. They start at 133 GB at $800/month, which translates to only $6/GB. For those at the smaller end of the spectrum, there is also a Pay As You Go plan available for the more occasional user. 

The cheapest residential proxy plans can be purchased online, allowing you to get started with the service right away. The higher end plans do ask you to contact sales, where you talk to a representative about your precise requirements for a custom quote.

Some plans offer a 7-day free trial.

Oxylabs: Features

Oxylabs charges above average prices, but browse the feature list and it becomes understandable. Its products are built for large-scale projects, with few of the limits you'll find elsewhere.

There are no restrictions on concurrent sessions, for instance, and there are no extra charges, either. Just go ahead and do what you need to do, and Oxylabs should be able to cope.

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

Subnets also have no set limits either. The company says that if you buy 1000 proxies (for instance), you can generally have from 4 to 1000 subnets, 'depending on your business needs.'

Furthermore, there's support for authenticating proxy access by username and password, or a trusted IP address. Some providers limit you to a set number of IPs, and on the lowest tiers you're only allowed a single one. Oxylabs doesn't just allow you to add as many specific IPs as you need, you can even add ranges (192.168.1.0/24.)

However you set up your requests, Oxylabs claims excellent performance, with an average 99.95% success rate and 0.6s proxy speed across its over 100 million residential IP’s.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to fully talk about Oxylabs web scraper IPs, known as Web Unblocker, but they're just as comprehensive as the rest of the service. It can perform human like browsing, and even get past CAPTCHA’s. The SERP Scraper API targets cities across 195 countries, extracts the precise data points you need from all kinds of search engine pages, and delivers them in CSV or JSON. 

You can even decide where to store the data, if the standard S3 or Google Cloud storage isn't right: now that's seriously flexible.

Oxylabs: Interface and use

Purchase an Oxylabs plan, log into your new account and you're taken to the company's web dashboard- the one-stop proxy management hub.

There's more to learn and do here than with most of the competition, but for good reason: as we've seen Oxylabs has significantly more features than just about anybody else.

When getting started, for instance, you're prompted to create one or more sub-users to help manage your projects. This isn't just about authentication via a username and password, though, as you can also opt to limit the traffic a particular sub-user can consume, which is a handy way to manage your bandwidth allocation.

It's similar elsewhere in the dashboard. Oxylabs isn't doing anything particularly complicated, it's just giving you extra powerful options that are lacking elsewhere. While regular proxy lists just come in plain text, for instance, Oxylabs can show them in JSON. And a Statistics page shows you how your projects are proceeding in full detail, including target domains, traffic used, number of requests, errors and more.

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

The Integrations page has useful tutorials on how to work with Jarvee, Octoparse, Puppeteer, Proxifier and many other third-party tools, for instance. Also, the more technical Developer's documentation  is excellent with high quality articles and guides for using the service.

If you need more, though, Oxylabs offers live chat 24/7, andwe got helpful responses within a couple of minutes. You can raise a ticket, or send an email, but we did not find a direct phone number to just talk to your account manager. Others claim to have 'premium' support, but Oxylabs actually delivers it, and it's great to have that level of resource available when you're managing a heavy-duty proxy project.

Oxylabs: Final verdict

With its high starting fees, bandwidth costs, and not being technically made for newcomers, Oxylabs probably isn’t for freelancers or any smaller projects. However, for everything else, it really is a premium service. Those that will make the most out of the multitude of features this service provides, will be getting a top-quality provider. Add to that the comprehensive list of multiple proxy types, Oxylabs delivers for anyone who needs a premium quality service.

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