Bright Data vs. Oxylabs – Which proxy solution is better?

Bright Data and Oxylabs are popular proxy and web scraping solution providers in the market. Both offer potent scrapers and massive proxy networks that allow you to collect valuable web data, such as social media mentions and customer profiles, and keep an eye on competitors while bypassing online blocks and restrictions. In this Bright Data vs Oxylabs comparison data, we’ll dive deep into their offering, understanding their proxy and scraping solutions.

For a fair comparison, we’ll compare them based on criteria including ease of use, proxy pool, web scraping capabilities, customer support, performance, and reliability.

Bright Data vs OxyLabs – Which one to choose?

The choice for the proper web scraping and proxy tool depends on your requirements, especially when deciding which tool offers more aligned features such as country-level or city-level targeting, IP pool size, access to residential, data center, mobile, or ISP proxies, ease of use, web scraping feature, and customer support.

Bright Data started its journey in 2014 when founders Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman launched their operation from Israel. It boasts a revenue of $73.5 million and serves over 20,000+ businesses.

The availability of these features makes Bright Data an excellent choice for understanding the competition in industries such as Real Estate, Ad Tech, Travel, e-commerce, Data Security, etc.

Oxylabs overview

Oxylabs is based in Lithuania. It was founded in 2015 by Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas. Their revenue is around $5 million (estimate), and they serve 2000+ customers worldwide.

To better understand their difference, let’s go through their key features below.

Bright Data vs. Oxylabs key features

Proxy pool size is crucial in enabling you to gather web information. If the pool size is extensive and diverse, you get more freedom and success in your operations, especially in IP reuse, less detectable, and higher success.

Among these two contenders, Oxylabs offers access to a bigger pool size with

Oxylabs proxies are located worldwide and are available in 195 countries, but primarily in the US, Germany, China, France, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. They offer city-level targeting.

Bright Data is not far away as it boosts:

Bright Data’s IPs are located in 195 countries, with a more significant presence in the United States, Germany, Brazil, Great Britain, South Korea, India, Russia, Spain, Canada, China, Japan, and France.

There is no clear winner here, as both offer sufficient proxies to handle tasks. Both can handle unique requests and ensure a high success rate for web scraping operations.

Apart from a colossal proxy pool, it is also vital to source the proxies ethically. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs follow ethical means when creating trusted proxy numbers, which ensures trust among users. Bright Data deploys various methods to ethically source IPs. These include:

Overall, Bright Data is very serious about ethical IP sourcing as it reflects on the data that companies source using the Bright Data proxy service. They also buy IPs.

Oxylabs also deploys extensive processes to ethically source IPs. They acquire residential proxies from actual users and real-world devices. They rate the residential proxies using their tier system, which identifies and tags users on an ethical bar. If users show unethical activity, they’re instantly removed from the proxy network. Also, they gain users’ permission before inviting them to the network. Oxylabs’ primary source of residential proxies is Honeygain, a crowdsourced web intelligence network that rewards users for their participation.

In short, both Oxylabs and Bright Data know the importance of ethical IP sourcing and how it impacts real business when they carry out their studies. Any user who participates in sharing their resources gives complete consent and hence offers value to the network.

Bright Data’s web scraping solutions are impressive because of their simplicity, customizability, and variety of features, including Web Scraper API, Scraping Browser, SERP API, Web Unlocker, and the ability to create and deploy serverless functions. Oxylabs also does a great job at web scraping by offering specialized APIs for SERP, eCommerce, and the web in general.

Bright Data’s Web Scraper APIs are at the core of their web scraping solution, providing the ability for data discovery, data parsing, bulk request handling and data validation. These are programmable, easy-to-use APIs that offer unlimited scaling and unmatched scalability and help you auto-pilot web scraping. Bright Data makes working with popular sites accessible with specific API solutions such as LinkedIn Scraper API, Walmart Scraper API, Instagram Scraper API, etc.

Apart from the Web Scraper APIs, Bright Data’s other excellent scraping solutions include:

Oxylabs, on the other hand, only offers Scraper APIs. These APIs are fine-tuned to scrape the web, handling complex proxy management and scraping techniques. Their Scraper APIs offer features such as Web Crawler, Custom Parser, and Scheduler. Additionally, they offer Web Unblocker.

Both Bright Data and Oxylabs offer access to ready-to-use datasets and industry-leading compliance, including GDPR, CCPA, and the EU data protection regulatory framework. To fast-track market understanding, Bright Data offers management data collection with pre-defined reliable datasets available from any public website. It removes the need to bypass blocks or maintain scraper.

For example, you can grab Amazon datasets to learn how they operate, extract key lessons, and implement them on your own eCommerce site.

Bright Data offers datasets from various categories, including Business, eCommerce, Social Media, Real Estate, and Finance. You can grab these data in your preferred data format, including CSV, XLSX, JSON, and JSON, and deliver via Azure, S3, PubSub, or Google Cloud. If you don’t find your preferred dataset, you can request it as well.

Oxylabs, on the other hand, also offer pre-defined datasets, including:

In conclusion, Bright Data offers a better, ready-to-use dataset with plenty of options. Oxylabs launched its dataset solution recently, but I think it’ll take time for them to improve it to Bright Data standards.

Both Bright Data and Oxylabs are easy to use. The onboarding is smooth, and features are accessible through the left-side menu. Due to its limited feature set, first-time users may find Oxylabs easier to set up. However, users may need more technical knowledge to integrate scraping APIs, as Oxylabs is a developer-focused solution.

Bright Data, on the other hand, offers many features aimed at novice users. To manage proxies, you need to use its dedicated Proxy Manager tool. It also comes with beginner-friendly tools, including an intuitive visual interface (that lets users configure scrapers without coding skills), template scrapers, and documentation. Overall, Bright Data has a slight learning curve, which benefits teams in the long run.

Oxylabs dashboard lets you buy rotating and residential proxies, but you need to contact customer support for other subscriptions. Bright Data, on the other hand, enables you to purchase everything directly from the dashboard.

Overall, Bright Data offers a better and easy way to configure, deploy, and use APIs and scrapers, which is ideal for non-coders. Oxylabs is relatively challenging, considering that it requires technical expertise to use.

When it comes to scalability and performance, none disappoint. They offer excellent scalability and performance — with Oxylabs offering slightly faster proxies. Their proxy success rate ranges from 97 to 99%, hinting at robust infrastructure that rarely fails.

On average, proxies from Bright Data and Oxylabs connect to proxies in different countries in 0.5 to 1 second. Oxylabs is fast, with Bright Data closely behind. However, in my research, I found Oxylabs’s Mobile proxies to be twice as fast as Bright Data’s.

So, if you’re looking for pure performance, then Oxylabs is a better pick, especially if you’re working with the mobile platform. However, don’t discount Bright Data, as it still performs highly and can suit any data requirement.

Bright Data vs. Oxylabs: Other Aspects Worth Considering

In terms of management tools, Oxylabs is more straightforward to use, even though both tools have spent considerable effort in providing good management tools. Oxylabs’s dashboard provides easy-to-access features. Each service has its own tab, which makes it easier to access. They have also focused heavily on providing enough statistics to help the user understand the project’s progress.

Bright Data, on the other hand, uses Zones, which combine information such as plans or sub-users. This combined look might seem complex, but with time, you can get used to it, as it offers customizability and control over your views.

For managing proxies, Bright Data does a better job as it offers a dedicated Proxy Manager software, through which you can enable features such as SOCKS5. Oxylabs doesn’t do an excellent job with these criteria as it asks users to create a gateway themselves, which requires technical expertise and the need to go through its detailed documentation.

For APIs, Oxylabs separates residential and data center service APIs, making them easy to manage. Bright Data lacks this approach and offers an all-in-one approach, requiring users to understand and customize the APIs before implementing them. Lastly, you can buy any subscription directly from the dashboard in Bright Data, whereas Oxylabs only lets you purchase rotating and residential proxies. If you need anything else, you’ll need to contact customer service.

When it comes to customer support, Oxylabs offers a quicker response through 24/7 live chat. They also provide a dedicated account manager if you opt for an expensive plan.

Bright Data also offers 24/7 support via ticketing system and mail. Even though you won’t get instant replies similar to live chat, you can expect replies to land in your inbox. If you want a quicker response, you can connect through WeChat or get support via call. Like Oxylabs, you also get an assigned account manager. Both Bright Data and Oxylab offer detailed, easy-to-follow documentation, including guides, videos, FAQs, webinars, and integration instructions.

Bright Data and Oxylabs offer excellent proxy integration with third-party software. This helps you to achieve your goals without worrying too much about compatibility. For example, you can integrate Bright Data to Puppeteer, a Node.js library that lets you control Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. This high-level API setup is a headless approach and works directly within the browser. Another example is Openbullet integration, which lets you do web testing.

Bright Data lets businesses extract data for AI and machine learning training. This is done in a structured way, ensuring that AI only uses validated and parsed datasets for the best results. Moreover, Bright Data uses AI for web scraping and machine learning techniques to combat advanced anti-scraping technologies. In addition, Bright Data offers Bright Insights, a dedicated eCommerce-focused tool that uses AI to transform public data into insights. Businesses can use the tool to boost sales, optimize assortments and pricing, monitor sellers, or recover lost revenues.

Oxylabs also utilizes AI to improve its ethical proxy network and Scraper APIs. These AI-powered solutions aim to bypass anti-bot systems and ensure that even the stringent sites get unlocked. Oxylabs established an AI and ML advisory board in 2020 to improve AI integration to enhance proxy and scraper solutions.

Bright Data vs Oxylabs: Cost Analysis

Bright Data’s pricing is expensive, as it offers many premium features. But Oxylab’s pricing is not far behind, making them competitive. As Bright Data offers many services, it’s not practical to list their prices here.

However, we can look at its Proxy network pricing below:

All these proxy network plans come with Growth ($400 per month) and Business ($999 per month) plans. Yet, they offer a free trial if you want to make your opinion.

Similarly, Oxylabs proxy plans include:

These Oxylabs plans come with higher-tier plans as well.

Alternative to Bright Data and Oxylabs

Bright Data and Oxylabs alternatives include Apify, Octoparse, and Smartproxy.

Final Words on Bright Data vs. Oxylabs: Which One is Better?

Choosing Bright Data or Oxylabs depends on your web data collection needs. Both are top players in the proxy and data extraction market.

Oxylabs, for instance, is more developer-focused and offers advanced customization through coding. Deploying and managing proxies, APIs, and scrapers requires technical skills. On the other hand, Bright Data is a feature-rich solution focusing on ease of use, especially for users with no technical knowledge.

Both offer a vast pool of proxies, with Oxylabs leading in terms of raw numbers. They’re also faster when it comes to performance, making them an ideal choice for businesses who want to scoop large data sets backed by reliance cloud infrastructure. However, Bright Data’s feature set shines, offering access to SERP API, Scraping Browser, and Web Unlocker. It also provides impressive ready-to-use datasets, ideal for businesses who want instant insights without worrying about setting up and managing proxies and scrapers.

Overall, I rate Bright Data and Oxylabs highly. Each has its specific target audience and use cases, with top-notch services. However, if you want me to pick one, I’ll choose Bright Data due to its trusted proxy solution and tons of tools. Before making a choice, I always recommend Tekpon readers to try out free trials of the said service. Only after that, make an informed choice!