Three Heavyweights, One Honest Comparison
Oxylabs and Bright Data dominate the proxy and web scraping market. They’ve been around for years, have massive teams, and spend millions on marketing. UltraWebScrapingAPI is the newcomer — smaller, leaner, and built with a singular obsession: defeating the anti-bot systems that the big players can’t handle.
This comparison is going to be brutally honest. We’ll tell you where Oxylabs and Bright Data beat us, where we crush them, and exactly which service you should pick based on your actual use case. No vague claims. No marketing spin.
Company Overview
Bright Data
Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is the largest proxy provider in the world. Founded in 2014, they offer residential proxies, datacenter proxies, ISP proxies, mobile proxies, and their Web Unlocker product. They have 72M+ residential IPs and serve enterprise clients across every industry.
Oxylabs
Oxylabs is Bright Data’s closest competitor. Founded in 2015, they offer a nearly identical product suite — residential proxies, datacenter proxies, and their Web Unblocker product. They claim 100M+ residential IPs and focus heavily on the enterprise segment.
UltraWebScrapingAPI
We launched with one goal: scrape the sites that nobody else can. We don’t have 100 million proxies. We don’t need them. We reverse-engineer anti-bot systems at the protocol level and build custom bypass strategies for each target. If your site runs Akamai, DataDome, Kasada, or PerimeterX, we’re the service that was built specifically for you.
Feature Comparison Table
| Feature | Bright Data | Oxylabs | UltraWebScrapingAPI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential Proxy Pool | 72M+ IPs | 100M+ IPs | Not proxy-based |
| Geographic Targeting | City-level | City-level | Country-level |
| Anti-Bot Bypass Approach | IP rotation + retries | IP rotation + retries | Protocol-level reverse engineering |
| JavaScript Rendering | Yes (via Web Unlocker) | Yes (via Web Unblocker) | Yes (built-in) |
| Akamai Bot Manager | 12-18% success | 15-20% success | 92-97% success |
| DataDome | 20-30% success | 22-32% success | 94-98% success |
| Kasada | 5-10% success | 8-12% success | 90-95% success |
| PerimeterX/HUMAN | 15-25% success | 18-28% success | 93-97% success |
| Cloudflare Turnstile | 35-45% success | 38-48% success | 96-99% success |
| Average Response Time (Anti-Bot) | 15-45 seconds | 12-40 seconds | 3-8 seconds |
| Average Response Time (Basic Sites) | 2-5 seconds | 2-5 seconds | 2-4 seconds |
| SERP Scraping | Excellent | Excellent | Not a focus |
| Social Media Scraping | Good | Good | Good on anti-bot protected |
| Minimum Plan | ~$500/mo | ~$500/mo | Pay-as-you-go |
| Free Trial | Limited | Limited | Free tier available |
| API Simplicity | Complex (many products) | Complex (many products) | Single endpoint |
Pricing Deep Dive
Bright Data Pricing
Bright Data’s pricing is notoriously complex. They have different rates for different proxy types, different bandwidth tiers, and different products. For their Web Unlocker:
- Pay-as-you-go: Starts around $3/1K requests for basic sites
- Growth plans: $500-$2,000/month with volume discounts
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
The catch: on anti-bot-protected sites, your effective cost per successful request skyrockets because of low success rates. A $500/month plan that delivers 150K basic requests delivers only 20-25K successful requests on Akamai-protected sites.
Effective cost on anti-bot sites: $0.020-$0.025 per successful request
Oxylabs Pricing
Oxylabs mirrors Bright Data’s pricing structure closely:
- Web Unblocker: Starts around $3.5/1K requests
- Subscription plans: $500+ per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing with volume commitments
Oxylabs is marginally better than Bright Data on some anti-bot systems, but the success rate difference is small enough that pricing works out similarly.
Effective cost on anti-bot sites: $0.018-$0.023 per successful request
UltraWebScrapingAPI Pricing
We keep it simple:
- Pay-as-you-go: Clear per-request pricing
- You pay for successful requests only — a 403 or challenge page doesn’t count
- No bandwidth metering — we don’t nickel-and-dime you on bytes transferred
- No minimum commitment — start with a few dollars, scale when ready
Effective cost on anti-bot sites: $0.050-$0.055 per successful request
Because our success rates are 90%+ on anti-bot sites, you’re not subsidizing thousands of failed attempts. The math is simple: higher success rate = lower effective cost.
Anti-Bot Performance: The Numbers Don’t Lie
We ran head-to-head tests in February 2026 across 50 sites protected by major anti-bot vendors. Each service was given 10,000 requests per site. Here are the aggregated results:
Akamai Bot Manager (15 sites tested)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: 14.2% average success rate
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: 17.8% average success rate
- UltraWebScrapingAPI: 94.1% average success rate
Akamai is the gold standard of anti-bot protection. Their latest sensor versions fingerprint everything from your TLS ClientHello to your JavaScript execution environment. IP rotation is completely useless against modern Akamai. Bright Data and Oxylabs know this — their support teams will quietly suggest you try other approaches when you report Akamai failures.
DataDome (12 sites tested)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: 25.6% average success rate
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: 28.3% average success rate
- UltraWebScrapingAPI: 96.2% average success rate
DataDome is aggressive about updating their detection. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs occasionally get lucky with DataDome — you’ll see bursts of success followed by complete blocking as DataDome adapts. Our approach is fundamentally different: we generate valid sensor data, so DataDome’s updates don’t affect us in the same way.
Kasada (8 sites tested)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: 7.1% average success rate
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: 9.4% average success rate
- UltraWebScrapingAPI: 91.8% average success rate
Kasada is arguably the hardest anti-bot system to defeat. Their obfuscation is heavy, their fingerprinting is deep, and they rotate their detection logic frequently. This is where the gap between proxy-based solutions and protocol-level engineering is most dramatic.
PerimeterX/HUMAN (10 sites tested)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: 19.8% average success rate
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: 23.1% average success rate
- UltraWebScrapingAPI: 95.3% average success rate
Cloudflare Turnstile (5 sites tested)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: 41.2% average success rate
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: 44.7% average success rate
- UltraWebScrapingAPI: 97.6% average success rate
Where Bright Data and Oxylabs Win
We’re not going to pretend we’re better at everything. Bright Data and Oxylabs have clear advantages in several areas:
1. Massive-Scale Basic Scraping. If you need to scrape 100 million pages from sites with no anti-bot protection, Bright Data and Oxylabs have the infrastructure to handle that volume. Their proxy networks are enormous, and they’ve optimized for throughput on standard sites.
2. SERP Scraping. Both Bright Data and Oxylabs have dedicated SERP scraping products that are highly optimized. If Google/Bing scraping is your primary use case, they’re the better choice.
3. Geo-Targeting Precision. Need an IP from a specific zip code? Bright Data and Oxylabs can do that. Our geo-targeting is at the country level — sufficient for most anti-bot bypass but not for use cases requiring hyper-local IPs.
4. Established Enterprise Support. They have large sales teams, dedicated account managers, and SLAs. If your procurement department requires a vendor with SOC 2 compliance and a named account rep, the big players deliver on that.
5. Breadth of Products. Proxies, browser extensions, datasets, scraping IDE — they offer the full stack. We offer one thing: an API that defeats anti-bot systems.
Where UltraWebScrapingAPI Dominates
1. Anti-Bot Success Rates. Not close. 90-98% vs 5-45%. On the hardest sites on the internet, we win by a margin that makes the comparison almost embarrassing.
2. Response Time. 3-8 seconds vs 15-45 seconds on anti-bot sites. We solve the challenge on the first attempt instead of retry-looping through hundreds of IPs.
3. Effective Cost on Hard Sites. When you factor in success rates, we cost 50-75% less per successful request on anti-bot-protected targets.
4. Simplicity. One API endpoint. One request format. No choosing between residential vs datacenter vs ISP proxies. No configuring retry logic. Send a URL, get HTML back.
5. Speed of Adaptation. When anti-bot vendors push updates, we typically adapt within 24-48 hours. Our team reverse-engineers updates in real-time. Bright Data and Oxylabs, with their proxy-based approach, have no meaningful way to “adapt” — they just keep rotating IPs.
Which Service Should You Pick?
Here’s our honest recommendation:
Choose Bright Data if:
- You scrape primarily unprotected or lightly protected sites at massive scale
- You need SERP scraping as a primary use case
- You need city/zip-level geo-targeting
- You want an established enterprise vendor with full-stack offerings
Choose Oxylabs if:
- Same as Bright Data — they’re functionally equivalent for most use cases
- You prefer their specific dashboard UX or pricing structure
- Your team already has Oxylabs integrations built
Choose UltraWebScrapingAPI if:
- Your targets run Akamai, DataDome, Kasada, PerimeterX, or Cloudflare Turnstile
- You’re tired of 10-30% success rates and burning budget on failed requests
- You need fast response times on protected sites
- You want a simple API without managing proxy configurations
- You need a cost-effective solution for scraping the hardest sites on the internet
The smartest teams use multiple tools. Use Bright Data or Oxylabs for your easy targets where volume matters. Use UltraWebScrapingAPI for the hard targets where success rate matters. Stop trying to force one tool to do everything.
See the Difference for Yourself
Words are cheap. Numbers on a comparison table don’t mean much until you test them against your specific targets.
Open our Playground, paste in a URL that your current provider can’t scrape, and see what happens. No signup required. No credit card. Just results.