Head to head
Bright Data vs Oxylabs
If you are choosing between Bright Data and Oxylabs, you are shopping at the top of the residential proxy market and paying for it. Both are premium, both gate full access behind business verification, and both will resolve almost anything you point them at. The real question is which kind of premium you want.
Short version: Oxylabs has the better independently-measured numbers right now and a smoother self-serve path. Bright Data has the bigger pool, more managed tooling, and the only true pay-as-you-go billing of the two. I pay for both. Here is where each one earns its price.
| Bright Data | Oxylabs | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | from $4.00/GB | from $6.00/GB |
| Pricing model | per-GB | per-GB |
| Pool size | 400M+ | 175M+ |
| Free trial | 7-day trial for businesses | 3-day refund window for verified businesses |
| Best for | web-scraping, ad-verification, enterprise | enterprise, ad-verification, high-success |
| Try it | Visit Bright Data | Visit Oxylabs |
Price
Oxylabs starts at $6/GB on its $30 Starter plan and falls to $2.50/GB at the 1 TB Corporate tier. There is a monthly minimum and no real pay-as-you-go. Bright Data lists residential at $8/GB but runs a standing 50% promo, code RESIGB50, that drops the entry rate to $4/GB for three months, and it bills pay-as-you-go with no commitment.
At low volume Bright Data on promo is both cheaper and far more flexible, because Oxylabs makes you commit to a plan. At a terabyte a month the two land near $2.50 to $3/GB and price stops being the thing that decides it.
Success rate and reliability
This is the part most comparisons get wrong, because the two were not tested on the same footing. In Proxyway's 2026 testing, Oxylabs hit 99.93% success at a 0.60s average response on an easy global endpoint. Bright Data sat that round out, so there is no current independent number for it at all. Its last clean third-party test was March 2024: 98.96% on the same kind of soft endpoint, and a much rougher 84.63% once the targets got hard.
Take two things from that. Anyone quoting a shiny 2026 Bright Data success rate is making it up, because the data does not exist. And those high-90s figures are against soft endpoints anyway. On real anti-bot targets like Instagram or Google, every residential network falls into the 70s and 80s, and the gap between these two closes. The one 2026 test that put both on hard targets had them roughly tied.
Pool and coverage
Bright Data claims the largest pool going, 400M+ monthly residential IPs across 195 countries, with free city, state, ZIP and ASN targeting. Oxylabs claims 175M+ across 195 countries, with country, city, state, ZIP, coordinate and ASN targeting. Both figures are vendor self-reports that count monthly IPs rather than concurrent ones, so read them as a rough sense of scale, not fact.
For most jobs the difference is academic. It only bites at the extremes: very obscure geographies, or very high concurrency where a deeper pool means fewer repeat IPs.
Getting in the door
Oxylabs runs KYC on every customer, and its own material puts approval at roughly three in four, so about a quarter of applicants get turned away. The residential trial is limited to verified businesses; individuals get a 3-day money-back window instead.
Bright Data splits access in two. Its Immediate Access tier needs no verification but is fenced in (no restricted domains, GET requests only, throttled), while Full Access runs the same business check Oxylabs does. If you need to start today and you are not a registered business, Bright Data is the only one of the two that will have you.
Features and tooling
Both sell a lot more than raw proxies. Oxylabs has its Web Scraper API, Web Unblocker and the OxyCopilot assistant, backed by strong docs and account managers. Bright Data goes wider: Web Unlocker, a Scraping Browser, SERP and Scraper APIs, and prebuilt datasets.
If your plan is to buy unblocking as a service rather than run rotation yourself, Bright Data has the deeper kit. If you would rather have a tight, well-supported core product with less to wade through, that is Oxylabs.
The call
There is no wrong answer here, and that is the honest takeaway. These are the two most capable residential networks on the market, and most jobs will run fine on either.
Handed the choice with no other context, I would reach for Oxylabs, because the current independent numbers are its and the self-serve path is smoother. I would switch to Bright Data the moment the brief mentioned pay-as-you-go billing, no business entity, unusual geographies, or managed unblocking I did not want to build myself.
Either way, start on the trial or the promo and run it against your own targets. Judge it on the success rate you measure, not the one a table promises you.
Visit Bright Data Visit Oxylabs
FAQ
Is Bright Data or Oxylabs cheaper?
At low volume, Bright Data, because its standing 50% promo takes entry to $4/GB pay-as-you-go while Oxylabs starts at $6/GB with a monthly minimum. At a terabyte a month they converge near $2.50 to $3/GB and price stops mattering.
Which has the bigger proxy pool?
Bright Data on paper, at 400M+ monthly residential IPs against Oxylabs at 175M+. Both are unaudited self-reports counting monthly rather than concurrent IPs, so the gap matters less than it looks for most jobs.
Do both require KYC?
For full access, yes. Oxylabs verifies every customer. Bright Data verifies for Full Access but also offers a no-KYC Immediate Access tier with limits, so it is the only one of the two you can start on without a business entity.
Which is better for hard targets like Instagram or Google?
Close. On the one 2026 test that measured both on hard anti-bot targets, they came out roughly tied and well below their high-90s scores on easy endpoints. Test both on your specific targets before committing.