Oxylabs Alternatives: Four Proxy Providers Compared

Bright Data, Decodo, IPRoyal and Node4 compared with Oxylabs residential proxies on billing unit, smallest order, targeting and session length.

If you are leaving Oxylabs because of how its residential plans are sold, the alternative depends on the problem. For irregular usage, IPRoyal (traffic that never expires) and Bright Data or Decodo (pay as you go) remove the monthly commitment. For a smaller monthly plan, Decodo and Node4 both start below Oxylabs' Starter plan. If you are leaving for coverage or session length, look harder before you switch: Oxylabs already publishes long sessions and fine-grained targeting.

Competitor facts are linked to the vendor's own page and were checked October 5, 2026. Nothing here is a speed or block-rate measurement; that part you test on your own targets.

Why buyers look past Oxylabs

Oxylabs sells residential proxies as a monthly subscription billed per GB; the residential page lists a Starter plan at $30 a month for 5 GB, no pay-as-you-go option, and a free residential trial, available once. That shapes who leaves:

• Irregular usage. A monthly allowance suits steady jobs. A team that scrapes in bursts pays for months it barely uses.
• A smaller first order. A buyer who wants to prove one workflow with a gigabyte or two has smaller options elsewhere.
• Proxy-only purchase. Oxylabs also sells scraping APIs. If your crawler already handles fetching and parsing, you only need the proxy product, and every provider below sells that on its own.

Reasons that do not hold up: Oxylabs offers 195 or more countries, filtered by country, state, city, continent, ZIP, coordinates and ASN, and holds the same IP for up to 24 hours. Leaving for either would be a step down.

Residential alternatives side by side

Two cells decide most switches. If usage is irregular, IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic and the pay-as-you-go options remove the monthly commitment that Oxylabs, Decodo's plans and Node4 all have. If one login or checkout has to finish on one address, Oxylabs, Decodo and IPRoyal publish sticky windows of hours or days, and Node4's residential ceiling is much shorter. Every one of them is a maximum rather than a minimum, so a long stateful job needs to tolerate an exit change on any of them. The sticky versus rotating sessions guide shows how to build for that.

A small monthly job, with numbers

For example, suppose you need about 5 GB of residential traffic every month. Oxylabs' Starter plan covers exactly that: $30 a month for 5 GB. Node4's 5 GB tier is $6.99 a month. Decodo's 3 GB plan is $11.25 a month for 3 GB, with the remaining 2 GB at its pay-as-you-go rate or a larger plan. IPRoyal's rate at 5 GB is not recorded here; its 1 GB price is $7.00 a GB on a 1 GB subscription, or $7.35 a GB pay as you go, and larger purchases cost less per GB. Bright Data pay as you go is five times its per-GB rate.

The cheapest line at this volume is not the whole answer. Oxylabs gives a 24-hour session window and ZIP and coordinate targeting for that price; Node4 gives neither. Choose on the feature you need first, then on the total.

Where Node4 fits, and where it does not

Node4's residential targeting is carried in the proxy username (country, state, city, ASN and session), described in the targeting guide. It does not offer ZIP or coordinate targeting, a sticky window measured in hours, pay as you go, or traffic that carries over past the month. If any of those is your reason for leaving Oxylabs, Node4 is the wrong replacement.

The part that differs is datacenter. Node4's dedicated, shared and rotating datacenter proxies run on IP blocks it owns in the United States, Italy and Spain. Oxylabs sells $2.25 an IP a month for dedicated datacenter IPs, from 3 IPs, in 188 countries, a far wider spread. Node4's smallest dedicated order is 5 proxies at $7.45 a month, with no data cap (dedicated prices). Choose Node4 for datacenter only if your exits belong in one of those three countries.

Test before you move traffic

Pick two candidates, buy each one's smallest order, and run the same job through both and through your current Oxylabs setup. Keep the target, headers, retry rules and concurrency identical so the proxy is the only variable.

curl --proxy "$PROXY_URL" \
  --proxy-user "$PROXY_USER:$PROXY_PASS" \
  --silent --show-error --output /dev/null \
  --write-out 'status=%{http_code} seconds=%{time_total}\n' \
  "$TARGET_URL"

That proves the credentials and route work. Follow it with your real scraper and count records that pass your own validation, per gigabyte spent. If your workflow is stateful, include a run longer than the session you plan to use, so you see what happens when the exit changes.

The decision

Stay with Oxylabs if its session length, ZIP or coordinate targeting, or scraping APIs are part of the job. Move to IPRoyal or a pay-as-you-go plan if usage is irregular. Shortlist Node4 if a small monthly residential allowance with a short sticky window is enough and you also want datacenter exits in the US, Italy or Spain on one account. For a two-provider view, read the Node4 and Oxylabs comparison; for a wider field, see Bright Data alternatives and the residential provider comparison.