Oxylabs Review | PCMag

If you’re serious about privacy, you should consider using a proxy service on your devices. Oxylabs does the job of hiding your IP address, offering you a huge pool of IP addresses spread across the world with an extensive and transparent privacy policy. While it’s good at obscuring your location, it’s less suited to watching geo-blocked streaming media—in our testing, throughput was slow and Netflix was blocked. The service is pricey, and users of its residential-level plans (reviewed here) may find they get more for less from other services, as Oxylabs reserves most of its best features and plans for business customers.

How Much Does Oxylabs Cost?

Oxylabs follows the standard proxy pricing model for its residential service, including by-the-gigabyte pricing and monthly plans. With 195 countries of coverage and an above-average 100 million IP addresses for desktop and tablet use, prices start at $10 per gigabyte for just one gigabyte. This is high but not outrageously so; far less reasonable is the lack of a discount whether you buy one gig or 1,000. IPRoyal, for comparison, charges $7 per gigabyte and offers a sliding scale of discounts.

Oxylab’s monthly pricing scheme is much more reasonable. A 30-day plan for residential proxies starts at $99 per month and gets you 11GB of traffic. This translates to $9 per gigabyte, already less than the per-gigabyte price. Discounts grow with the size of your purchase. A $300-per-month plan provides 38GB, which works out to $8 per gigabyte. The $600-per-month plan brings it down to $7 per gigabyte for 86GB of traffic.

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

Oxylabs also offers mobile proxies from a pool of 20 million IP addresses in 140 countries. These are priced at $22 per gigabyte if you choose the à la carte option, $200 per month for 10GB of bandwidth, $380 per month for 20GB, or $850 per month for 50GB.

We appreciate that Oxylabs offers a one-week free trial for its paid services so that you can test the company’s features before taking the plunge. Oxylabs accepts payment via all major credit cards, as well as PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and AllPay.

The rest of Oxylabs’ offerings are mainly centered around data center customers, where buying IP addresses in bulk to gather large datasets is the primary focus of the service, and its business proxy options reflect that. There are scraper APIs, dedicated data center proxies (starting at $50 per month), and a feature the company calls Web Unblocked.

How a VPN Works

The last one is interesting, as Oxylabs claims it uses an “AI-powered proxy solution” that is capable of bypassing anti-bot systems and will refund you for the cost of your plan if your account is ever blocked by a particular website or sites that you’re trying to scrape data from.

What Features Does Oxylabs Have?

Oxylabs has a standard collection of features that you should expect from a residential web proxy, including 195 countries of coverage and an above-average 100 million IP addresses to choose from. You can also set up auto-rotation of your IP address on a cadence you choose, and you can connect an unlimited number of devices to Oxylabs’ network. All plans connect either through the HTTPS protocol or SOCKS5.

For a primer on what all of this means for you and your internet security, check out our proxy explainer. Oxylabs offers an extensive collection of helpful tech support articles for those who want to dive deeper into its offerings and how to implement them.

Since we’re only evaluating Oxylabs’ residential proxies, we won’t delve too deeply into its business features.

Your Privacy With Oxylabs

Oxylabs is based in Lithuania, which, as part of the EU, abides by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This alone is encouraging for those concerned about privacy while connected to Oxylabs’ network.

For information more specific to Oxylabs, we thoroughly scrutinized the company’s privacy policies. We recommend companies that are open and forthcoming about their privacy practices, and Oxylabs’ policies and practices check both of those boxes. If you’d like to read Oxylabs’ risk and legal compliance in full, you can see an extensive breakdown of all the company’s information here.

Hands On With Oxylabs

Unlike IPRoyal, which has an in-house proxy extension for Chrome and Firefox, Oxylabs requires you to configure it manually or use another third-party extension to link to its network. The process for manual setup depends on your preferred web browser. Note, however, that there is no way to configure a proxy directly in the Chrome browser; instead, doing so relies on either you working in your system settings or a third-party extension.

We chose to use the Firefox extension FoxyProxy based on the recommendation of the company’s extensive and helpful technical support database. FoxyProxy allows you to create new proxy profiles for each country you want to connect from and easily copy/paste them from the dashboard into the Firefox extension.

Once we got the proxy address, username, and password via the Oxylabs dashboard (pictured below), we configured our system to route its desktop and web traffic through the Oxylab network via the FoxyProxy browser extension. We selected the IP address closest to our test machine in Denver, Colorado.

(Credit: Oxylabs)

From there, you can select which region you want to use from a drop-down menu at the top right of your internet browser.

(Credit: FoxyProxy)

Access to geo-blocked streaming media is an important reason why consumers spoof their IP addresses. Services like Netflix sometimes block or limit access when you use a VPN to obscure your location. This is why you may prefer proxy services, as their much larger IP address blocks usually make it easier to quickly cycle through options until you find one that works freely.

We tried the regions we typically include when testing Netflix on VPNs, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan. We are disappointed that all were Closed to access from the Oxylabs residential proxy network. Netflix refused the connection entirely—even its splash page was blocked. All were left completely Open on the IPRoyal residential proxy network. Typically, we find some VPN services marked as Limited. (Check here for our definitions of Open and Limited.)

Whether or not you’ll be able to stream your content at a quality level that’s worth the investment of a proxy is another issue entirely. That’s a function of performance, and, as you’ll see below, proxies in general and Oxylabs in particular may not be the best choice for this.

Oxylabs Speed and Performance

To understand a proxy’s impact on your internet experience, we run a series of tests using Google’s speed test tool and find a percent change between test results with and without the proxy running.

(Credit: PCMag/Google)

As you can see above, while connected to a local Denver proxy from Boulder, CO, our test system, which is hardwired to a home router, reported a download speed reduction of 99.90% and an upload speed reduction of 97.02%.

IPRoyal, for comparison, reduced our test downloads by 94.2%. That service, however, didn’t affect our upload rate. While these scores are better (far better in the case of uploads) than Oxylabs, users who put a premium on speed might find a VPN to be a better bet. Most of our VPN testing shows drastically less speed reduction than we see here.

Remember that network connections are variable, and your experience may differ from ours. These results are more of a snapshot for comparison than a final verdict on performance. We believe that features and overall value are far more important than speed, and we discourage you from judging a proxy service solely on these results. 

For transparency, we are just getting started with our proxy coverage here at PCMag, so we are still determining just how typical or aberrant these results are. For more information about our testing practices, see how we trest proxies.

Caveats for Consumers, Better for Business

The biggest strengths of Oxylabs’ residential offerings are its large pool of IP addresses, good tech support articles, and reassuring privacy policy. These are countered by its lack of access to Netflix and other streaming services, severe download and upload speed reductions, and high prices. If you’re only buying a few IP addresses or small amounts of bandwidth at a time, IPRoyal offers streaming access and pricing that may better suit your needs. That said, businesses that need datasets like e-commerce pricing across multiple destinations, real estate pricing across hundreds of markets, or SEO search data from different search engines compiled in one place might find Oxylabs an attractive service.