Oxylabs and Bright Data are data collection-focused web data platforms, offering products in the same domain, such as:
- Proxy servers
- Web Unblocker
- Proxy manager
- Web scraping solutions
If you’re in the market for a proxy/web data collection solution, you’re likely to come across these two vendors. So it’s important to understand
- What distinguishing features these vendors have
- What distinguishes them from each other
- Which scraping service provider is best for your requirements.
Oxylabs vs. Bright Data in a snapshot
Bright Data and Oxylabs are web data collection platforms that provide web scraping and proxy server services to businesses. Moreover, according to user ratings and reviews we analyzed on review platforms such as G2 and Trustradius, both also provide similar customer service and technical support.
However, Bright Data offers a broader array of services than Oxylabs, including proxy and web scraping services based, as claimed by them. . With the exception of Bright Data’s Super proxy servers, both vendors provide identical proxy server solutions.
Bright Data’s services are slightly more expensive than Oxylabs’. We will delve deeper into this topic in the following sections.
Bright Data evaluation
Bright Data is a web data collection platform that provides proxy and web scraping solutions to assist businesses in ethically gathering public web data and transforming unstructured data (e.g., HTML) into structured data (e.g., xl) without any coding required. Its offering includes:
Proxy services:
Advanced proxy services:
Web scraping services:
- Datasets
- Web scraper IDE
User Ratings
- G2: 4.7/5
Free trial & PAYG
- Except for the Dataset product, each proxy and web data solution comes with a free trial and pay-as-you-go options.
Bright Data’s pros & cons
Pros:
- In addition to Web Scraper IDE, Bright Data offers pre-made web scraper templates that allow users to modify the existing code to their specific business requirements and needs.
- If you cannot find a pre-made collector that meets your data collection requirements, you can either create your own data collector using the vendor’s code environment or request a custom collector for your specific data requirements. The video below demonstrates how to use Bright Data’s pre-made data collector.
- Provides pagination functions for product discovery and HTML parsing.
- All proxy types are covered.
- If you intend to get data effortlessly and cost-effectively instead of scraping data from web sources yourself. Bright Data offers Datasets for various web scraping applications, including eCommerce, social media, and search engines. You can request custom-made datasets for your particular scraping applications.
Cons:
- It might be expensive for small-scale projects.
Figure 1: Pros & Cons of Bright Data
Oxylabs evaluation
Oxylabs is a web data collection company that provides proxy and web scraping services. The proxy providers initially started with datacenter proxies and later expanded into other types of proxies, including residential proxies. Over time, they diversified their offerings with web scraping solutions such as APIs. Additionally, they now offer four types of proxies: residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP (static residential proxies). Its services include:
- Residential:
Targeting: Country, state, city, ASN, ZIP, coordinates. You have the option to select a proxy location by coordinates, but the selection is confined to within a 10-mile range of the given coordinates.
Sticky sessions: The default duration for a session is set to 10 minutes, or it can end after 60 seconds if no requests are made. Oxylabs allows users to customize the desired length of the session.
IP rotation: Assign a different IP with each request
Supported protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5
- Mobile:
Targeting: Country, state, city, coordinate, and ASN level
IP rotation: Keep the same IP for up to 30 minutes, and automatic IP rotation for each request
- Datacenter:
- Dedicated datacenter proxies:IP addresses with city and state targeting.
- ISP
Targeting: Country-level
IP rotation: Allow users to maintain the same residential IP a continuous proxy session for up to 5 hours.
Supported protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5
- Web scraping APIs:
- Web scraper API: Extracts public web data from websites or specific web pages.
- SERP scraper API: Gets SERP data in JSON from search engines.
- E-Commerce scraper API: Obtains eCommerce web data such as product price, descriptions, review data from eCommerce marketplaces.
- Real estate scraper API: Obtains real-time data including pricing, location, property type from real estate websites such as Zillow, Redfin, Zoopla.
Web scraper API solutions
Oxylabs previously organized its scraping services into separate categories—like SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), e-commerce, and general-purpose APIs—but has now merged them into a single “Web Scraper API.” They provide specialized scraper API solutions for platforms such as Amazon, Google Shopping, Bing, and Google. You don’t need to purchase separate subscriptions for different web scraper APIs.
OxyCopilot
Oxylabs announced the introduction of a new feature, OxyCopilot, to their web scraper API solutions this year. OxyCopilot allows users to automatically generate parser code for any target. The tool scrapes the webpage, creates a parser schema, and delivers structured output. Here are the steps to use OxyCopilot:
Provide instructions for the scraper.
2. Add a parser prompt for the target website.
3. The tool will scrape the target based on your instructions and preview the output.
4. You can see the data output for the provided instructions.
User Ratings
- G2: 4.8/5
Free trial & PAYG
Pay-as-you-go: Available for residential and mobile proxies. Residential proxies are priced at $4 per GB, while mobile proxies cost $9 per GB.
Refund: Refunds are available only for self-service products, with the exception of any pay-as-you-go plans, which are non-refundable.
Free trial: 7-day free trial and 5 free datacenter IPs
Oxylabs’ pros & cons
Based on our analysis of customer reviews and the vendor’s claims, Oxylabs has the following advantages and disadvantages:
Pros:
- Most products are not available for a free trial (see the pricing section of Oxylabs).
- Handles a high volume of requests.
- Provides real-time crawler.
- The most frequently mentioned positive aspect of Oxylabs is its customer service.
Cons:
- According to Eirik S.’s (product manager) review, there was an issue with scraped data accuracy when using Oxylab’s search API, and callbacks occasionally failed.
Transparency statement
AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies including Bright Data, and Oxylabs.
Further reading
- Top 3 Octoparse Alternatives & Competitors
- Top 10 Proxy Service Providers for Web Scraping
- The Ultimate Guide to Proxy Server Types
- Web Scraping Tools: Data-driven Benchmarking
If you have more questions, do not hesitate contacting us:
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