What Oxylabs offers beyond proxies
Founded in Vilnius in 2015, Oxylabs sells a full web-data stack rather than a single network. The proxy side spans residential, datacentre, ISP (static residential), mobile and SOCKS5. On top of that sit managed products — a Web Scraper API, an unblocking layer, a hosted headless browser and AI-assisted tooling that generates scraping and parsing code from plain-language prompts. That breadth is the point: a team can buy raw IPs, a fully managed extraction endpoint, or both from one vendor and one invoice.
The second pillar is compliance posture. Oxylabs is a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, states that residential IPs come from consenting, compensated participants, and publishes ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 credentials alongside a documented KYC policy. New accounts are screened, and Oxylabs reserves the right to decline use cases it considers inappropriate. For a regulated buyer whose legal team must sign off on a data-collection supplier, that paperwork is often the deciding factor — and it is genuinely hard for smaller providers to match.
Independent benchmarking has repeatedly placed Oxylabs' residential pool among the largest tested and its success rates near the top of the field, with enterprise customers getting named account managers rather than a ticket queue. None of that is marketing gloss; it is the reason the company is a default shortlist entry for large-scale collection.
- Full proxy catalogue: residential, datacentre, ISP/static, mobile, SOCKS5
- Managed layers above the network: scraper API, unblocker, headless browser, AI code generation
- Founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative; consent-based residential sourcing
- ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 credentials plus a published KYC policy
- Named account managers and live chat support at enterprise tiers
Oxylabs committed tiers vs prepaid bandwidth
Oxylabs' residential and mobile pricing is organised around monthly subscription tiers with a committed volume. The per-gigabyte rate falls as the commitment rises, and you can top up within a billing period if you overshoot. That structure is rational for the vendor and for a steady buyer — predictable demand lets capacity be planned and the saving passed back — but it produces two recurring friction points for everyone else.
The first is variance. If your traffic is bursty, seasonal, or concentrated in a few weeks a quarter, you either size the commitment to your peak and pay for months you barely touch, or size it to your average and pay top-up rates whenever a project spikes. Unused monthly allowance is not something you can generally bank against next month. The second is onboarding time: KYC screening is a deliberate part of the model, and reviewers commonly report it adding days to the start of an engagement. If you need to run a feasibility test this afternoon, that is a real obstacle.
Neither of these is a fault. They are the trade-offs of a compliance-first, enterprise-contract business. They simply do not fit a team that wants to buy a small amount of traffic, prove an approach works, and only then decide how much to commit.
How Nefo prepaid proxies work
Nefo sells access to a network rather than a managed extraction platform, and the commercial shape is inverted: you buy bandwidth up front, starting at 5GB, and flexible plans are non-expiring — the balance sits in the account until traffic actually moves through it. Generating credentials costs nothing; only traffic consumes bandwidth, so you can create a separate credential per project, per environment or per client without touching the balance.
Technically the surface is conventional and quick to wire in. Credentials are issued for HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, all with username/password authentication. Targeting covers 227 countries and territories, with the United States addressable down to state and city, region and city in selected countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France, and ASN/ISP targeting to pin traffic to a specific carrier or cable operator within a country. Sessions are either rotating — a fresh IP per request, for wide distributed collection — or sticky, holding one IP from one minute up to about 24 hours for logins, carts and other multi-step flows.
There is also a mobile line, priced on a different axis to per-gigabyte residential: 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration, from hours to 30 days, each carrying one live mobile IP that you keep or change on demand, with US state- and carrier-level targeting. For work that needs genuine carrier IPs on a fixed port, renting the port is often easier to reason about than metering mobile traffic by the gigabyte.
- Prepaid from 5GB; flexible plans are non-expiring
- Credential generation is free — only traffic draws down bandwidth
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, username/password authentication
- 227 countries and territories; US state and city; ASN/ISP targeting within a country
- Rotating per request, or sticky sessions from 1 minute to ~24 hours
- Mobile 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration rather than per GB
How to switch from Oxylabs to Nefo
If you are using Oxylabs' raw residential proxies, the move is mechanical. Both sides authenticate with a username and password against a host and port, so the change is an endpoint swap plus new credentials in whatever holds your configuration. The one thing not to do is hand-edit your existing Oxylabs username strings: geo and session parameters are encoded differently by every provider, and porting them by string surgery is how silent mistargeting happens. Generate fresh credentials with the country, state, ASN and session type set explicitly, then point your client at those.
If you are using the Web Scraper API, the unblocker or the hosted headless browser, be honest with yourself about the scope. Those products absorb work your code currently does not do — retry logic, JavaScript rendering, response validation, parsing into structured output. Replacing a managed endpoint with a raw proxy means that logic moves back into your stack. For teams already running their own crawler and fetch layer this is often no loss; for teams who bought the API specifically to avoid maintaining it, swapping to any pure proxy network is a step backwards, not a saving.
A sensible sequence is to run both in parallel for a week on a single workload rather than cutting over wholesale.
- Regenerate credentials rather than translating Oxylabs username parameters by hand
- Map each job to a session type: rotating for breadth, sticky where state must persist
- Re-check geo assumptions — verify exit country and region on a sample of live requests
- Separate credentials per project so usage attribution stays readable
- Budget engineering time if you are replacing a managed scraper API, not just proxies
- Run both providers side by side on one workload before cutting over
When to stay with Oxylabs
Stay if your volume is large and steady. Committed tiers exist precisely to reward that shape, and a provider with one of the biggest tested residential pools and consistently high success rates is not something to trade away for a marginal rate change.
Stay if procurement or legal drive the decision. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 evidence, a documented consent-based sourcing model, EWDCI membership and a published KYC policy are concrete artefacts a reviewer can file. If your organisation needs a supplier questionnaire answered with certificates rather than assurances, that requirement outranks pricing structure.
Stay if you depend on parts of the catalogue that Nefo does not cover — managed unblocking, a hosted headless browser — or if a named account manager and a support relationship are part of what you are actually buying. Consolidating those under one vendor has real operational value.
When Nefo is the better Oxylabs alternative
Nefo fits when your consumption is uneven or unproven. Prepaid, non-expiring bandwidth removes the forecasting problem entirely: a quiet month costs nothing, and a busy month draws down a balance you already hold. Starting at 5GB ($4.50) means a technical evaluation costs a few dollars rather than a month's commitment.
It also fits agencies and consultancies juggling several small mandates at once. Free credential generation means every client, region or environment can get its own credential with its own targeting and session policy, all drawing from a single balance you top up when it suits you — no per-seat or per-project subscription arithmetic.
Finally, it fits SOCKS5-native tooling and mobile-IP work. SOCKS5 is a first-class option on every credential rather than a tier-gated extra, and 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems rented by the day suit short campaigns and account-tied workflows that would otherwise need an enterprise mobile contract. The trade is straightforward and worth stating plainly: you get a network and a dashboard, not a managed data platform with an account manager attached.
Frequently asked questions
Nefo has no committed tier. Residential starts at $0.90/GB for 5 GB and drops to $0.53/GB at 10 TB, with contracts from $0.30/GB above 10 TB. Oxylabs' per-gigabyte rate improves as the monthly commitment rises. Low or irregular volume usually favors prepaid; steady volume is worth pricing both ways. See pricing.
No. Oxylabs' residential and mobile proxies are organized around monthly tiers with committed volume. Nefo is prepaid: buy from 5 GB and draw it down as traffic passes, with no monthly minimum. Mobile ports are the exception in structure, since they are rented by duration instead of by gigabyte.
No. Bandwidth stays on your balance until used. That is the difference most people notice coming from a committed monthly allowance, where the following month starts from zero regardless of what went unused.
For common cases, yes: 227 countries and territories, 22,417 cities and 14,252 ISPs/ASNs. Oxylabs exposes extra filters in some products, such as postcode, coordinates and operating system. If your workload depends on those, verify before switching. See residential proxies.
No. Nefo provides proxy access: credentials, targeting, sessions and usage tracking. Oxylabs' scraper API and unblocker handle rendering, retries and parsing above the network. With any raw proxy network that logic returns to your code, which costs little if you already run your own fetch layer.
Yes to both. Every residential proxy speaks HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, and sticky sessions hold one IP from 1 minute up to 24 hours. Rotating sessions issue a new IP on every request. See rotating proxies.