Bright Data vs Oxylabs vs IPRoyal: Proxy Pricing and Pros/Cons in 2026
A head-to-head comparison of Bright Data, Oxylabs, and IPRoyal — current 2026 pricing for residential, datacenter, and ISP proxies, plus the pros and cons that actually matter when you're choosing one.
If you’ve ever tried to scrape a website at any real scale, you know the wall you eventually hit: the target starts blocking you. The fix is proxies — routing your requests through a rotating pool of IP addresses so you look like thousands of different visitors instead of one very persistent bot. The problem is that the proxy market is a jungle of confusing per-GB pricing, “contact sales” tiers, and wildly different success rates on hard targets.
Three names come up over and over: Bright Data, Oxylabs, and IPRoyal. They occupy genuinely different positions in the market, and picking the wrong one means either overpaying by 4x or getting blocked on the sites you actually care about. Here’s how they stack up in mid-2026.
The Quick Take
| Bright Data | Oxylabs | IPRoyal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Enterprise scale, hardest targets, full scraping stack | Enterprise/mid-market, strong scraper APIs | Budget projects, bursty workloads, hobbyists |
| Network size | Largest (~150M+ residential IPs) | Very large (~100M+) | Smaller but solid |
| Price tier | Premium (most expensive) | Premium (slightly under BD) | Budget (cheapest) |
| Standout | Breadth + best unblocking | Support + scraper APIs | Non-expiring traffic, true pay-as-you-go |
If you just want the verdict: prototype on IPRoyal, scale defended targets on Oxylabs or Bright Data. The rest of this post explains why.
The Challenge: Three Products Wearing the Same Hat
The first trap is assuming these are interchangeable. They all sell “proxies,” but the products inside differ in ways that matter:
- Residential proxies — IPs from real consumer devices and connections. The gold standard for avoiding blocks, and the main cost driver. Priced per GB of traffic.
- Datacenter proxies — fast, cheap IPs from servers. Easy to detect, but fine for lenient targets. Usually priced per IP or per GB.
- ISP (static residential) proxies — residential IPs hosted in datacenters. Combine residential legitimacy with datacenter speed and stability. Priced per IP per month.
- Scraping/unblocking APIs — managed endpoints that handle proxies, retries, JavaScript rendering, and anti-bot bypass for you. Priced per successful request.
Bright Data and Oxylabs are full platforms that sell all of these plus datasets and scraping tools. IPRoyal is primarily a proxy provider — leaner, cheaper, and lighter on the managed-API side. Keep that framing in mind as we go through the numbers.
Pricing Breakdown
Residential Proxies (the number most people care about)
| Provider | Pay-as-you-go entry | Committed/bulk floor |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | ~$8.40/GB | ~$3.00/GB |
| Oxylabs | ~$4/GB (promo) | ~$3.49/GB |
| IPRoyal | ~$7.00/GB (1 GB) | ~$1.75/GB (bulk) |
The headline rates can be misleading. Bright Data’s $8.40/GB starting price is steep, but it falls to ~$3.00/GB on committed plans. Oxylabs is more aggressive at entry with promo pricing around $4/GB. IPRoyal looks pricey at the 1 GB tier but drops to $1.75/GB at volume — and that traffic never expires, which is a genuine differentiator if your scraping is bursty rather than constant.
Datacenter Proxies
- Bright Data: from ~$0.60/IP; per-GB as low as ~$0.066/GB at scale
- Oxylabs: dedicated from $1.20/IP (down to ~$0.90/IP in bundles); shared per-GB $0.50–$0.65/GB
- IPRoyal: from ~$1.39/IP on the 90-day plan, with unlimited bandwidth
If you’re hammering lenient targets, IPRoyal’s unlimited-bandwidth datacenter plans are hard to beat on raw cost.
ISP / Static Residential
- Bright Data: ~$1.50–$3.00/IP/mo
- Oxylabs: from ~$1.60/IP
- IPRoyal: from ~$2.40/IP/mo
Scraping / Unblocking APIs
- Bright Data: Web Scraper ~$3 per 1,000 page loads; Web Unlocker ~$3 per 1,000 successful responses; SERP API ~$0.75–$1.50 per 1,000 queries
- Oxylabs: Web Scraper API priced per successful request, broadly comparable to Bright Data; free trial available
- IPRoyal: thin here — it’s a proxy provider, not a full scraping-platform competitor
Pros and Cons
Bright Data
Pros
- Largest, most reliable IP pool; best at unblocking heavily defended sites (Cloudflare and friends)
- Widest product range — proxies, Web Unlocker, Scraper IDE, SERP API, ready-made datasets, scraping browser
- Granular geo/ASN/carrier targeting and a strong compliance posture
- Polished dashboard and tooling
Cons
- The most expensive option, especially pay-as-you-go
- Complex pricing with many add-ons — easy to overspend
- Steeper learning curve; Know Your Customer (KYC) verification can be a hurdle for small users
- Overkill and over-budget for simple jobs
Oxylabs
Pros
- Performance and pool size near Bright Data, often at a slightly lower price
- Best-in-class customer support with dedicated account managers
- Strong, well-documented Web Scraper API; a good enterprise fit
- Solid ethical/compliance reputation
Cons
- Still premium-priced — not for tight budgets
- Best rates require monthly commitments or a sales conversation
- KYC and a higher floor than budget providers
- Feature breadth slightly behind Bright Data
IPRoyal
Pros
- Cheapest of the three at scale (~$1.75/GB residential at bulk)
- Non-expiring residential traffic — buy GB once, use whenever; great for irregular workloads
- True pay-as-you-go with no mandatory commitment and a low barrier to entry
- Unlimited-bandwidth datacenter plans and simple, transparent pricing
Cons
- Smaller IP pool means lower success rates on the hardest anti-bot targets
- No full scraping-platform stack — limited APIs compared to BD and Oxylabs
- Lighter support and less enterprise tooling
- Less granular targeting at the top end
How to Choose
The decision usually comes down to a single question: how hard are your targets, and how much are you willing to pay to beat them?
- Scraping hard, well-defended targets at scale, with budget as a secondary concern → Bright Data.
- You want enterprise-grade reliability and excellent support, slightly cheaper than Bright Data → Oxylabs.
- You’re cost-sensitive, your traffic is bursty or occasional, or you’re running small-to-mid projects → IPRoyal. The non-expiring traffic model alone justifies a look.
A pattern worth stealing: prototype on IPRoyal because it’s cheap and commitment-free, then graduate specific blocked targets to Oxylabs or Bright Data. You don’t have to standardize on one provider, and you shouldn’t — the same lesson that applies to AI video models applies here. Keep your scraping logic portable, and treat the proxy layer as a swappable commodity.
Key Takeaways
- Residential proxy per-GB cost is the number that dominates most bills. Bright Data and Oxylabs land around $3–$3.50/GB committed; IPRoyal goes as low as $1.75/GB at volume.
- Pay-as-you-go entry prices are misleading — almost every provider drops sharply at commitment or volume tiers.
- IPRoyal’s non-expiring traffic is a real edge for irregular workloads where you’d otherwise waste a monthly allotment.
- Bright Data and Oxylabs are platforms, not just proxies — if you need managed scraping APIs, datasets, or hard-target unblocking, that breadth is what you’re paying for.
- Don’t lock in. Prototype cheap, scale where you must, and keep your pipeline vendor-agnostic.