9 Best Oxylabs Alternatives in 2026: Scraping APIs and Proxies Without Per-GB Bills

By Rajesh Kannan, Co-Founder & CTO, Gramosoft · Last updated: November 1, 2026 · Oxylabs prices checked on oxylabs.io on November 1, 2026; other prices checked on each vendor's own pages between October 27 and November 1, 2026

Oxylabs is excellent infrastructure, but you pay for it in pieces. Proxies are billed per GB, its Web Scraper API is priced by target and by JavaScript rendering, and everything draws on one balance shared across nine products. This guide ranks nine alternatives, starting with GcrawlAI, where every page is one request with the browser and residential IPs included.

Quick comparison (details and sources for each tool follow)

The 9 best Oxylabs alternatives in 2026

These nine tools cover the two reasons teams leave Oxylabs. Some want the same proxy access for less money or less commitment; others never wanted to run proxies, browsers and parsers and just need the pages. They're ranked by how well each replaces Oxylabs for a general scraping workload, with GcrawlAI first.

Two names are left out on purpose. Webshare has been owned by Oxylabs since 2022, according to Oxylabs' own announcement, so moving to it doesn't change vendor. NetNut's domains were seized by the FBI on July 2, 2026, though some older lists still recommend it.

1. GcrawlAI: one request per page, browser and IPs included

Best for: teams that buy proxies only to collect pages, plus RAG pipelines and AI agents · License: MIT core, managed Cloud API · Language: Python SDK (gcrawl-sdk 0.5.8), REST, MCP

GcrawlAI replaces the stack most Oxylabs customers build: residential proxies, a headless browser fleet, retry logic and a parser. You send a URL and get rendered HTML, Markdown or JSON back. Residential IPs, the browser and Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai and PerimeterX handling are part of the same request. A blocked page, CAPTCHA, timeout or server error isn't billed.

The homepage says it plainly: JavaScript rendering, anti-bot stealth and proxies are included in every request, with no credit system. The Batch tab shown above takes a list of URLs, a format (Markdown by default) and a country, and runs them as one job. There's no GB meter, so a 4 MB product page costs the same as a 50 KB article.

• Scrape, crawl and map: scrape a page into HTML, Markdown or JSON, crawl a site with depth control and duplicate filtering, or map its URLs first.
• Bulk jobs: batch runs and async jobs with webhooks, for the volumes you'd push through Oxylabs' Web Scraper API.
• Search and Deep Search: a Search API at one request per results page, and Deep Search, which merges several engines into one list.
• Extractors: ready-made structured data for common targets, and custom extractors for your own sites through a custom request.
• Screenshots and offline bundles: screenshots on mobile, tablet and desktop, and offline HTML bundles for audits.
• Free proxy list: a free proxy list of checked public proxies, for testing and small jobs.
• Agents and testing: an MCP server for Claude, Cursor and other agents, the Playground, and the docs.

A rendered page through residential IPs, a whole-site crawl and a search, each priced as one request per page:

# pip install gcrawl-sdk
from gcrawl_sdk import GcrawlClient, ScrapeOptions

client = GcrawlClient(api_key="gc-YOUR_API_KEY")   # or GCRAWL_API_KEY; base_url="http://localhost:8000" when self-hosted

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # One page, rendered, through residential IPs: one request, whatever the page weighs. No per-GB proxy bill or separate browser to run.
    page = client.scrape(
        url="https://www.example-shop.com/product/123",
        options=ScrapeOptions(html_enabled=True, markdown_enabled=True, proxy_geo="US", auto_scroll=True),
        wait=True,
    )
    print(len(page.html or ""), "bytes of rendered HTML")   # for your own selectors
    print(page.markdown[:300])                              # LLM-ready Markdown

    # A whole-site crawl: every page one request, however long it takes to render.
    job = client.crawl(url="https://docs.example.com/", limit=200, formats=["markdown"], wait=True)
    print(job.status, len(job.pages), "pages,", job.pages_failed, "failed (not billed)")

    # Ranked search results, one request per page of results.
    hits = client.search(query="best running shoes 2026", pagination=1, geo="US")
    for r in hits.results[:3]:
        print(r.position, r.title, r.url)

The diagram shows the difference in what you run. With Oxylabs proxies you pay per GB and operate the browser and parsers yourself; with GcrawlAI the page is one request and the bill follows the number of pages.

And the self-hosted core, for data that must stay on your own servers:

git clone https://github.com/GramosoftAI/GcrawlAI.git && cd GcrawlAI
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt && playwright install
cp .env.example .env                      # add your database, Redis and proxy settings
python -m api.core.db_setup
redis-server &
celery -A web_crawler.crawler.celery_config worker -l info &
uvicorn api.api:app --port 8000

Pricing (GcrawlAI pricing, checked October 28, 2026):

Every page is one request on every site, failed requests are never charged, and unused requests on paid plans roll over once.

Where it falls short: GcrawlAI sells pages, not IP addresses. If you need raw residential, ISP or mobile proxies for traffic that isn't scraping, or city and ZIP-level targeting, Oxylabs and the proxy networks below do that and we don't. There's no prompt-driven browsing agent, the ecosystem is younger, and self-hosting means bringing your own proxy accounts.

"Most teams don't want gigabytes. They want pages. When the bill is per GB, a heavier page costs more for the same data, and you still run the browser yourself. We price the page, with the browser and IPs inside it."

Rajesh Kannan, Co-Founder & CTO at Gramosoft

2. Bright Data: the premium head-to-head

Best for: teams that need Oxylabs-class proxy scale, with pay as you go · Type: residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies, Web Unlocker, scraping browser and datasets

Bright Data is the closest like-for-like move: a very large residential network, city-level targeting, and products for every layer from raw proxies to finished datasets. Its Web Unlocker charges per successful request instead of per GB. More in our Bright Data alternatives guide.

Residential proxy pricing (Bright Data residential pricing, checked November 1, 2026, with its current 50% offer for the first three months):

Web Unlocker (Unlocker pricing, checked October 27, 2026): 5,000 free requests a month, then $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests pay as you go, or $499 a month for 383,000.

Where it falls short: the per-GB rate doubles when the offer ends, there's no plan between pay as you go and $499 a month, and its catalogue is at least as complex as Oxylabs'.

3. Decodo: cheaper residential bandwidth

Best for: teams who like the Oxylabs model but want a lower rate per GB · Type: residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies, Site Unblocker and scraping APIs

Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, sells small monthly bundles, so you can buy 3 GB or 10 GB instead of committing to a $100 balance. Its entry rate is well under Oxylabs' $6 per GB, and it offers a money-back window on a first self-service purchase.

Residential pricing (Decodo residential pricing, checked November 1, 2026, plus VAT):

New users get a 3-day, 100 MB trial. The 14-day money-back guarantee applies only to a first purchase, with usage under 20% of the plan, and not after the free trial.

Where it falls short: it's still per-GB billing, so heavy pages cost more, and you still run your own browser and parsers on top.

4. SOAX: mid-volume residential traffic

Best for: teams around 100 GB a month that want to test before paying · Type: residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies on one plan

SOAX lets you sign up for a sandbox account free, without a card, and buy credits only when you're ready. Its Builder plan works out at $3 per GB for US traffic at 100 GB a month, half of Oxylabs' entry rate.

Pricing (SOAX residential page, checked November 1, 2026):

Where it falls short: other plans and rates sit on a separate pricing page, the per-GB rate depends on country tier, and like any proxy network it leaves the browser and parsing to you.

5. IPRoyal: traffic that never expires

Best for: irregular workloads where unused traffic would otherwise be lost · Type: residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies

IPRoyal's residential traffic doesn't expire, and you can buy it pay as you go or on a subscription that's 5% cheaper. That suits teams who scrape in bursts and don't want a monthly balance to use up. Its pool is listed at 64 million+ IPs in 195+ countries.

Residential pricing (IPRoyal residential proxies, checked November 1, 2026):

Where it falls short: at 1 GB it costs more per GB than Oxylabs, the page lists no tiers between 10 GB and 10 TB, and it's a proxy network, not a scraping API.

6. Zyte: for teams built on Scrapy

Best for: engineering teams whose spiders are written in Scrapy · Type: Zyte API for fetching, plus Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders

Zyte maintains Scrapy and bills per successful response, with a price set by a tier it assigns each site after your first requests. Easy sites can be much cheaper than Oxylabs' Web Scraper API; hard ones much dearer.

Pricing (Zyte pricing, Zyte API pricing docs, checked October 28, 2026), pay as you go per 1,000 successful responses:

Where it falls short: you don't know a site's tier until you've sent requests, and a rendered page on a Tier 5 site costs 16 times one on Tier 1.

7. ScraperAPI: simple monthly credit plans

Best for: teams that want a fixed monthly plan and parsed Amazon or Google data · Type: scraping API with structured endpoints, async jobs and DataPipeline

ScraperAPI replaces proxies, rendering and CAPTCHA handling with one endpoint and a monthly credit bundle. A plain page is 1 credit, but rendering and premium proxies multiply the cost. More in our comparison of the cheapest reliable scraping APIs.

Pricing (ScraperAPI pricing, credit costs, checked November 1, 2026):

Where it falls short: Hobby's 100,000 credits cover 4,000 rendered premium pages, the cheaper plans target only the US and EU, and responses with a 404 status are billed.

8. ScrapingBee: an easy API for small teams

Best for: small teams that want extraction rules and screenshots without managing proxies · Type: scraping API with JavaScript rendering, proxies, AI extraction and dedicated scrapers

ScrapingBee is one of the gentlest ways off a proxy dashboard: one URL, a few flags, HTML or JSON back, and every feature on every plan. Its credit multipliers work much like ScraperAPI's. More in our ScrapingBee alternatives guide.

Pricing (ScrapingBee plans, checked November 1, 2026; credit costs):

JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, premium proxies 10 (25 with JavaScript) and stealth proxies 75.

Where it falls short: a stealth page costs 75 times a plain one, credits don't roll over, and the free credits are a one-time trial.

9. Firecrawl: Markdown for LLMs

Best for: pages that go straight into a model or vector store · Type: scrape, crawl, map and search API with an AGPL open-source core

Firecrawl returns clean Markdown by default and prices most pages at one credit, with crawling and site mapping built in. It suits AI pipelines more than raw proxy work. We compared it with GcrawlAI in our Firecrawl alternatives guide.

Pricing (Firecrawl pricing, billing docs, checked October 27, 2026):

Where it falls short: JSON output adds 4 credits, pages that return 403 or 404 still cost a credit, and there's nothing between $19 and $99.

How Oxylabs pricing works

Oxylabs sells one monthly balance that every product draws from: residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies, Web Unblocker, Agent Browser and its Web Scraper API. Each product has its own unit and rate, and rates fall as the plan grows. These figures come from oxylabs.io, checked November 1, 2026.

Plans (Oxylabs pricing):

What each product costs, at the Starter rate and at the highest volume tier (residential, Web Scraper API):

A per-GB price only turns into a per-page price once you know how heavy your pages are, and rendered pages with images and scripts are often 1 MB or more. Oxylabs' Web Scraper API pricing page also states that all purchases made through self-service are non-refundable, so a balance you don't use is spent.

What 10,000 and 100,000 rendered pages a month cost

For rendered pages, GcrawlAI costs $29 for 10,000 and $101 for 100,000, on any site. Oxylabs' Web Scraper API costs $30 and $500 at plan level for a JavaScript page on a custom site, and its residential proxies $100 and $500 at 1 MB a page, before your own browser servers.

These are list prices, not a benchmark. Proxy rows assume 1 MB of traffic per rendered page and cover traffic only, not the headless browsers, retries and parsers you run yourself. IPRoyal is left out because it lists no tier between 10 GB and 10 TB. Free tiers are left out.

At 10,000 pages, Zyte on a Tier 1 site ($10.10) and Bright Data's Web Unlocker ($15) cost less than GcrawlAI's $29, and Oxylabs' Web Scraper API is a dollar more. For plain pages that don't need JavaScript, Oxylabs' /Scrape rate of $0.50 per 1,000 is cheaper than ours. At 100,000 rendered pages, Firecrawl and Zyte Tier 1 come in a dollar or two under GcrawlAI, which costs $399 less than Oxylabs' Web Scraper API and residential plans.

GcrawlAI's plans, for the cost section above:

Annual billing charges 10 months for 12, unused requests on paid plans roll over once, and Indian customers are billed in INR with a GST invoice. Full details are on the pricing page.

"Oxylabs' plain-page rate is lower than ours, and we say so in the table. Where we win is the rendered, protected page, because the browser, the IPs and the retries are already in the price."

Rajesh Kannan, Co-Founder & CTO at Gramosoft

Why teams look for an Oxylabs alternative

Oxylabs has a large, reliable network and strong compliance, and enterprise buyers with an account manager are often well served. Teams look elsewhere when per-GB billing makes costs hard to forecast, when the lowest rates sit behind large plans, or when they realise they wanted pages, not proxies.

• Bills follow page weight. At $6 per GB, 1,000 pages of 1 MB cost $6 in proxy traffic, and 1,000 pages of 4 MB cost $24, for the same number of pages.
• The good rates need big plans. Residential traffic is $6 per GB up to 5 GB and reaches $2.50 only past 1,000 GB, and Enterprise starts at $2,500 a month.
• Nine products, nine units. GB for residential, mobile, Web Unblocker and Agent Browser, IPs for ISP and datacenter, and results for the Web Scraper API, each priced differently by target and rendering.
• Self-service purchases are non-refundable. Oxylabs' pricing page says so, so an unused balance is lost.
• You still own the pipeline. With proxies you run the browsers, retries and parsers. Our guide to scraping past Cloudflare shows how much of that work is anti-bot handling.

Which Oxylabs alternative should you choose?

Start with what you actually buy Oxylabs for. If it's pages from protected or JavaScript sites, use GcrawlAI, where each page is one request. If the data must stay on your servers, self-host GcrawlAI's MIT core. If you need search results, Markdown for an LLM or AI agent access, GcrawlAI covers those too.

When Oxylabs is still the right choice, and when GcrawlAI is

Oxylabs still makes sense when you need IP addresses rather than pages: residential, mobile or ISP proxies for traffic your own software sends, city or ZIP targeting, or an enterprise contract with an account manager. For fetching pages, crawling sites, searching and feeding AI agents, GcrawlAI does the work at one request per page.

Keep Oxylabs only for:

• Raw proxy access under your own code, especially mobile and ISP IPs.
• Fine-grained city, ZIP or carrier targeting.
• Enterprise contracts and ready-made datasets your team already relies on.

Use GcrawlAI for the rest. Here's what one account gives you:

• Scrape: any URL as HTML, Markdown or JSON, with JavaScript rendering, residential IP rotation and stealth escalation in the same single request.
• Crawl and map: a whole site with depth control and duplicate filtering, or its URL list without rendering every page.
• Batch and async jobs: thousands of URLs in one job, with results by webhook.
• Search API and Deep Search: ranked results by country and page, and several engines merged into one list.
• Extractors: ready-made structured data, and custom extractors for your own sites.
• Screenshots and offline bundles: mobile, tablet and desktop captures, and offline HTML bundles for audits.
• Built for AI agents: an MCP server for Claude, Cursor and other agents, plus the Python SDK and REST API.
• Try before you build: the Playground, a free proxy list, and a Chrome extension that turns data you pick on a page into an API call.
• Your own servers: the MIT-licensed core runs self-hosted for teams whose data can't leave their network.
• Billing that doesn't move: one request per page, failed requests never charged, unused requests rolled over once, no GB meter, and INR invoices with GST for Indian teams.

If you're on Oxylabs today, start with the free plan's 50 requests: run your heaviest target through GcrawlAI, check the output, and compare it with what those pages cost you in GB.

"If you need IPs for your own software, keep a proxy network. If what you need is the page, you shouldn't have to run browsers and count gigabytes to get it."

Rajesh Kannan, Co-Founder & CTO at Gramosoft

Scraping responsibly

Every tool on this list can reach protected pages, and where proxy IPs come from now matters too, as the NetNut seizure showed. Collect public data, respect the terms that apply to you, keep request rates reasonable, and choose vendors that source IPs with consent. Nothing in this guide is about getting past logins.

See What Is Web Scraping? for the basics, and our guides on 403 errors and dynamic JavaScript websites for what happens when a scraper gets blocked.