Web scraping plays a crucial role in how modern companies collect and use online data. Businesses rely on it to track product prices, gather leads, study competitors, and even collect information for training AI systems. To do this effectively, you need a reliable tool built for large-scale data extraction. Two platforms that often come up in discussions are Oxylabs and Zyte.
Oxylabs is widely known for its huge proxy network and strong infrastructure designed for high-volume scraping tasks. Zyte, on the other hand, is popular among developers for its powerful scraping tools and close integration with the Scrapy framework. Both platforms are capable solutions, but they focus on slightly different users and workflows. In this guide, we compare their features, pricing, performance, and use cases to help you decide which one best fits your needs!
Oxylabs
Oxylabs is a Lithuanian company founded in 2015. It has grown into one of the world’s largest proxy service providers. The company specializes in building and managing large pools of residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP proxy IP addresses.
Oxylabs serves over 4,000 clients globally. These include Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions like Stanford, and investigative journalism organizations. Its core promise is simple: give businesses reliable, anonymous access to public web data at scale.
Beyond proxies, Oxylabs has expanded into scraping APIs and AI-powered data tools. The platform now covers the entire data extraction pipeline, from connecting to a target site to delivering structured, parsed results.
Zyte
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) is an Irish company with roots going back to 2010. It is the team behind Scrapy, the most widely used open-source web scraping framework in the world. This gives Zyte a unique developer credibility that few competitors can match.
Zyte’s main product is the Zyte API, an all-in-one web scraping interface that handles unblocking, browser rendering, and AI-powered data extraction in a single endpoint. It also offers Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders, a VS Code-based Web Scraping Copilot, and a Managed Data service where Zyte’s experts build and maintain custom data feeds for clients.
Zyte positions itself as a full-stack data extraction partner, with a strong focus on legal compliance and enterprise reliability.
Product and Pricing Comparison
Oxylabs Product Line
Residential Proxies
Oxylabs’ Residential Proxies are the flagship product. The pool contains over 175 million IP addresses sourced from real user devices. These IPs rotate automatically, making it nearly impossible for websites to detect and block scraping activity.
Key features include:
- 175M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries
- Average response time of 0.41 seconds
- 99.82% average success rate
- Advanced geo-targeting: country, state, city, coordinates, ASN
- Powered by QUIC protocol for faster connections
- Support for HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5
Residential Proxies are ideal for e-commerce scraping, ad verification, SEO monitoring, and any use case where websites aggressively block datacenter IPs.
Pricing starts at $4 per GB for the Basic plan (5GB/month at $20), dropping as volume increases.
Datacenter Proxies
Oxylabs’ Datacenter Proxies offer a cost-effective solution for high-volume scraping where speed matters more than residential-level anonymity. The pool includes over 2 million IPs across 32+ locations.
Key features include:
- 0.25 second average response time
- 99.9% uptime
- Unlimited bandwidth with fair usage policy
- Both pay-per-IP and pay-per-traffic billing options
- Free trial with 5 IPs, no credit card required
Pricing starts at $1.20/IP per month or $0.59/GB on the traffic-based plan. These proxies work great for price monitoring, review tracking, and website change detection, where speed is critical.
Mobile Proxies
Oxylabs also offers powerful Mobile Proxies designed to simulate real mobile user traffic. The network includes more than 20 million mobile IP addresses from 3G, 4G, 5G, and LTE networks available in 140+ countries. Since these IPs come from real mobile carriers, websites treat them like genuine mobile users, making them much harder to detect or block during scraping tasks.
Key features include:
- 20M+ real mobile IP addresses
- Coverage in 140+ countries
- Automatic IP rotation
- Support for HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 protocols
- 30-minute sticky sessions available
Pricing start at $5.40 per GB on the pay-as-you-go plan, while larger subscription plans can reduce the cost to around $7.50 per GB for 80GB per month.
ISP Proxies
ISP Proxies, also known as static residential proxies, combine the performance of datacenter IPs with the trustworthiness of residential IPs. They come from real Internet Service Providers like Comcast, BT Group, and Deutsche Telekom.
Oxylabs offers two variants: shared ISP Proxies (up to 3 users per IP) and Dedicated ISP Proxies (exclusively yours). Both support unlimited-duration sessions, meaning you can hold the same IP for as long as you need.
Key features include:
- 99.9% success rate on challenging targets
- HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 support
- Premium ASN providers: Comcast, Orange, Lumen, BT Group, Cox
- 17 locations including US, UK, Germany, France, Canada
Pricing: ISP Proxies start at $1.60/IP/month (10 IPs) and Dedicated ISP starts at $3.20/IP/month (5 IPs).
Web Scraper API
Oxylabs also provides powerful tools for users who want clean, structured data instead of raw website code. The Web Scraper API allows businesses to collect data from many popular websites and receive it in a ready-to-use format. Instead of building and maintaining scrapers manually, the API handles the complex work such as parsing pages, managing proxies, and bypassing blocks. One of its newest features is self-healing parser presets, which automatically adjust when a website changes its layout.
Key features include:
- Structured data output instead of raw HTML
- Self-healing parsers that adapt to site layout changes
- AI-powered scraping tools for non-technical users
- Natural language prompts to generate data queries
- Built-in proxy and anti-block infrastructure
- Free trial with up to 2,000 results
Pricing starts with a free trial that lets you run up to 2,000 results without a credit card, while paid plans start at $49 per month.
Zyte Product Line
Zyte API
The Zyte API is Zyte’s core offering. It is an all-in-one web scraping endpoint that automatically handles three major challenges: unblocking websites, rendering JavaScript-heavy pages in a headless browser, and extracting structured data using AI.
Instead of managing separate proxy rotation, browser automation, and parsing scripts, you send a single API request and get clean, structured data back. This dramatically reduces development overhead.
Key features include:
- Automatic anti-bot bypass and proxy rotation
- Built-in headless browser for JavaScript rendering
- AI-powered extraction for products, articles, jobs, real estate listings, and more
- Network intercept for capturing and modifying requests
- Geolocation targeting
- Pay-per-use pricing with a free tier
Zyte API is ideal for teams building production-grade scrapers who want to minimize infrastructure management. It works especially well for e-commerce product data, news articles, flight pricing, and business listings.
Pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model, starting from $0.13–$1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $1.01–$16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses, with monthly commitments.
Web Scraping Copilot
Web Scraping Copilot is an AI-powered VS Code extension built specifically for web scraping developers. It works as a smart coding assistant that understands scraping frameworks, especially Scrapy, and helps developers build scraping scripts faster. Instead of writing complex code manually, you can simply describe what data you want to extract, and the tool generates the scraping logic automatically.
The extension can create selectors, parsing rules, and testing setups, making it easier to build reliable scrapers. It also understands common anti-bot protections and can recommend solutions such as integrating the Zyte API when blocks occur.
Key features include:
- AI assistant designed specifically for web scraping
- Works directly inside VS Code
- Generates Scrapy spiders automatically
- Supports CSS and XPath selector generation
- Suggests anti-bot bypass strategies
- Automatically integrates Zyte API when needed
- Creates testable scraping code and fixtures
Scrapy and Scrapy Cloud
Zyte created and maintains Scrapy, the open-source Python framework that millions of developers use for web scraping. This gives Zyte enormous credibility in the developer community and a deep ecosystem of plugins, tutorials, and community support.
Scrapy Cloud is the cloud hosting platform for Scrapy spiders. Consider it as Heroku for web scrapers. You deploy your spider, set a schedule, and Scrapy Cloud handles everything from scaling to monitoring.
Key features include:
- Deploy via command line or GitHub integration
- Intelligent scheduling and real-time dashboard
- Built-in monitoring with Spidermon support
- Customizable containers for complex setups
- 7-day data retention on the free tier, 120 days on paid plans
Pricing: Scrapy Cloud pricing starts at free (1 concurrent crawl, 1-hour crawl time) and scales to $ 9 per unit per month on professional plans.
General Comparison Table
| Feature | Oxylabs | Zyte |
| Proxy Pool Size | 175M+ residential IPs | Not proxy-focused |
| Residential Proxies | Yes – 175M+ IPs | Via Zyte API only |
| Datacenter Proxies | Yes – 2M+ IPs | Via Zyte API only |
| Mobile Proxies | Yes – 20M+ IPs | Not offered |
| ISP Proxies | Yes – Static & Dedicated | Not offered |
| Scraper API | Web Scraper API | Zyte API (all-in-one) |
| Headless Browser | Headless Browser tool | Built into Zyte API |
| AI Tools | AI Studio, AI Scraper | AI-Powered Extraction |
| Scrapy Support | Basic integration | Full Scrapy + Scrapy Cloud |
| Cloud Hosting | Not offered | Scrapy Cloud |
| Legal Compliance | ISO 27001 certified | Industry-leading focus |
| Free Trial | 5 free IPs, no CC needed | Free tier available |
| Pricing Model | Per GB or per IP | Pay-per-use (API requests) |
| Best For | Proxy-heavy scraping | Full scraping workflow |
Performance and Reliability Comparison
When comparing performance, Oxylabs stands out for its raw proxy speed and reliability. Independent testing by Proxyway in 2024 reported that Oxylabs Residential Proxies achieved a 99.82% success rate with an average response time of around 0.41 seconds. This makes Oxylabs a strong option for projects that require large-scale proxy traffic and fast data requests.
Zyte API works a little differently, which makes direct comparison more difficult. Instead of simply providing proxies, it manages the full scraping process. This includes handling website blocks, rendering pages in a browser, and extracting the required data. Because of this integrated approach, Zyte focuses more on automation than raw proxy performance. The platform reports a 99%+ success rate for retrieving public data.
Both platforms also provide very reliable infrastructure. Oxylabs guarantees 99.9% uptime for its proxy network and operates through ISO 27001-certified data centers. Zyte offers a similar 99.9% uptime for Scrapy Cloud and benefits from more than 15 years of experience in web scraping technology.
In simple terms, Oxylabs is excellent for high-volume proxy routing, while Zyte is better suited for fully automated scraping workflows.
Use Case Comparison
When to Choose Oxylabs
- You need massive proxy capacity — 175M+ residential or 2M+ datacenter IPs
- You work in e-commerce, ad verification, travel fare aggregation, or cybersecurity
- You need mobile IPs for carrier-level anonymity
- You require dedicated or static IPs for long-running sessions
- Your team already has scraping code and just needs reliable IP infrastructure
- You need precise geo-targeting down to city or coordinate level
- You want AI tools to generate structured data with natural language prompts
When to Choose Zyte
- You are building scrapers with Scrapy and want native cloud hosting
- You want an all-in-one API that handles unblocking, rendering, and parsing
- Legal compliance is a top priority for your organization
- You want an AI coding assistant trained specifically for web scraping
- You need a Managed Data service where experts handle everything
- You are extracting structured product, article, or job listing data at scale
- You want to minimize infrastructure overhead and focus on data quality
Final Verdict
Oxylabs and Zyte are both powerful tools for web scraping, but they serve different types of users. Oxylabs is best for companies that mainly need a strong proxy network. It offers millions of residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter IPs that work well for large scraping projects. If your team already has scraping scripts and only needs reliable IP rotation and high success rates, Oxylabs is a great choice.
Zyte, on the other hand, focuses on a full scraping platform. It helps developers manage the entire scraping process, from writing spiders to handling anti‑bot protection and delivering structured data.
Some organizations even use both tools together. Oxylabs can provide the proxy infrastructure, while Zyte manages automated scraping workflows. The right choice depends on your project size, technical skills, and how much infrastructure you want to manage yourself.
FAQ
Oxylabs focuses on providing a massive proxy network with over 100 million IPs for enterprise-level data collection. Zyte specializes in end-to-end web scraping tools, including automated extraction and deep Scrapy framework integration, making it more developer-oriented.
For raw proxy infrastructure and high-volume requests, Oxylabs is the stronger choice with its extensive IP pool and dedicated account management. Zyte is better if you need a complete scraping pipeline with built-in anti-bot handling and data extraction.
Oxylabs uses usage-based pricing starting around $49 per month for datacenter proxies and higher for residential plans. Zyte offers a free tier for small projects and scales based on successful requests through its API, making it more accessible for startups.
Yes, Zyte was originally built by the team behind Scrapy and offers tight integration through Zyte API and Scrapy Cloud. This makes it a natural choice for developers already using the Scrapy framework for their scraping projects.
Yes, Oxylabs offers a Web Scraper API that handles JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and structured data delivery. However, Zyte’s scraping tools are more deeply integrated into a full extraction workflow compared to Oxylabs’ proxy-first approach.
Both platforms handle anti-bot protection effectively. Zyte uses smart fingerprinting and automatic retries built into its API. Oxylabs relies on its massive rotating proxy pool and Web Unblocker tool to bypass detection on difficult target sites.
Zyte is generally more beginner-friendly thanks to its free tier, clear API documentation, and automated scraping tools. Oxylabs is better suited for teams with existing technical infrastructure that need high-performance proxy access at scale.
Yes, some organizations combine both platforms. Oxylabs can provide the proxy infrastructure for custom scraping setups, while Zyte manages automated scraping workflows including spider management, anti-bot handling, and structured data delivery.
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