Bright Data Alternatives: 12 Proxy and Web Scraping Providers Ordered by Buyer Demand

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Brand24 and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 10 November 2026

Bright Data sells six things under one account: proxy networks, an unblocker, a hosted scraping browser, pre-built scrapers, a SERP API and ready-made datasets.

Its request-based products run $1.50 per 1,000 with no commitment, residential proxies list at $8 per GB, and Vendr puts the median Bright Data contract at $27,000 a year. Below are 12 Bright Data alternatives. Bright Data alternative searches split across these vendors, and each one covers one or more of those six jobs for a different price, billing model or network size.

The page is for data, growth and engineering teams holding a Bright Data invoice or a first quote for web data collection at scale. Bright Data offers the widest catalog in the category, and that breadth cuts both ways, since few teams use more than two of its six lines. Each entry gives the one difference that decides the switch, a price you can check on the vendor's own pricing page, and the page on this site that argues it in full.

Bright Data bundles six functions in one account: proxy networks (residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter), unblocking through Web Unlocker, browser automation through its Browser API, pre-built scraper APIs, a SERP API and ready-made datasets. The list comes from Bright Data's product menu and its pricing pages, read on 9 November 2026. Every entry below carries the same six bars. The bars map what each tool sells and focuses on. They don't rate quality.

See current pricing and the free tier

Start with Bright Data

5,000 free credits a month, renewing monthly, across the Web Unlocker, SERP API, Web Scraper API and Scraper Studio, no card required. A separate promotion matches your first deposit dollar for dollar, up to $500.

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Three vendors you can start with $50 or less: Oxylabs, DataForSEO and Apify

Each tool in this group lets a team spend its first $50 on web data before talking to sales. Oxylabs takes the lion's share of measured search demand against Bright Data, 50 of 70 monthly pair searches. Oxylabs is the one Bright Data alternative here that sells all six product lines. DataForSEO sells search and SEO data on a prepaid balance, and Apify sells a store of ready-made scrapers on a $19 plan.

01Oxylabs

Oxylabs is the proxy provider closest to Bright Data product for product, and its proxy-first infrastructure grew up in the same years. It sells residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxy networks, a Web Unblocker, a Web Scraper API, a hosted Agent Browser and datasets. Its residential pool is 175M+ IPs against Bright Data's 400M+, and its mobile pool is 20M+ against Bright Data's 7M+.

The price gap opens at volume. Oxylabs' residential rate falls to $2.50 per GB past 1,000 GB at list price, with no promo code. Bright Data's list rate bottoms out at $5 per GB on its $1,999 plan for 798 GB, and it reaches $3 only through a three-month promotion. At 1 TB a month, that is the difference between about $2,500 and about $5,000 at list, and $30,000 a year is no drop in the bucket for a data team.

Oxylabs now sells one subscription for every product: $15, $100 or $500 a month, then Enterprise from $2,500. A $5 welcome credit covers a first test, and OxyCopilot turns a natural language prompt into parser code at no extra charge on Scraper API plans. The help center adds a catch. Unused balance expires when the subscription ends, with no refund.

The two companies have been in court since 2018 over residential proxy patents. The Federal Circuit invalidated two Bright Data patents behind an earlier jury verdict, and the Supreme Court declined review in February 2026, making that final. The Bright Data vs Oxylabs comparison walks through the case list, uptime pages and compliance scope side by side.

One Trustpilot reviewer, Yuri Ustinov, described a "paid renewal, sudden suspension, contradictory support" in October 2026. Oxylabs holds a 3.9 TrustScore from 773 reviews.

Full Oxylabs vs Bright Data breakdown →

02DataForSEO

DataForSEO sells the search slice of Bright Data's bundle, plus SEO data Bright Data doesn't carry. Standard-queue Google results cost $0.0006 a page, which is $0.60 per 1,000. Bright Data's SERP API costs $1.50 per 1,000 requests with no commitment and $1.30 on its $499 Scale plan.

The billing model is the second difference. DataForSEO runs on a prepaid balance with a $50 minimum top-up and no subscription. The balance never expires, failed tasks aren't billed, and a $1 trial credit covers the Playground and the MCP server. Bright Data's monthly plans bill on the 1st and carry no rollover.

The cheap headline has conditions. The Standard queue returns results in about five minutes, Priority in about one, and Live in about six seconds, each at a higher rate. The devil's in the details here, since pulling 100 results on Live mode costs about $20 per 1,000, which the DataForSEO pricing report works through. Full browser rendering on the On-Page API adds $0.0051 a page.

Past results pages, DataForSEO stocks 8.5 billion Google keywords with Ads volumes, 1.8 trillion live backlinks with history to 2019, and Merchant, Business and App data. It sells no proxies, no unblocker and no hosted browser, so a team scraping product pages or social profiles still needs a second vendor for that data collection. Every API answers as structured JSON over a REST API, which saves the parsing step a custom scraper would need.

A G2 reviewer put the trade-off plainly: "The pricing structure can be a bit confusing." The DataForSEO review breaks down each API's rate.

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03Apify

Apify sells pre-built scrapers before it sells scraping infrastructure, and its store is a jack of all trades. Its store lists 113,190 ready-made Actors, from Google Maps and Instagram scrapers to lead extractors, and many are priced per result. Bright Data's equivalent is its Web Scraper API, which covers 1,200+ websites at $1.50 per 1,000 records.

The free plan gives $5 of usage a month at $0.20 per compute unit, with no card. Starter costs $19 a month plus usage, Scale $199 and Business $999, with compute falling to $0.13 per unit on Business. Apify also runs Crawlee, its open-source Node and Python library, so a team building custom scrapers can write its own scraping code and run it on the same cloud.

The gap shows up in proxies. Apify's residential proxy costs $8 per GB, falling to $7 on Business, which is Bright Data's list rate and double its current $4 promo. Apify sells no ISP or mobile proxies and no dataset marketplace, where Bright Data stocks 190+ datasets across 120+ domains. Google SERP proxy runs $2.50 per 1,000, against Bright Data's $1.50.

Billing is the other thing to iron out the details on in advance. Compute units are hard to predict before the first run, and a store Actor can add its own per-result fee on top of platform usage. Prepaid usage expires at the end of each cycle.

A TrustRadius reviewer, Luca Palumbo, wrote in October 2026 that "the results are often incomplete, missing email addresses, names, or phone numbers," a quote captured in the data extraction tools ranking.

Where Apify ranks →

Five credit-billed scrapers with no standalone proxy network, from $16 to $299 a month

Each tool in this group bills in credits, tasks or rows and hides the proxies inside the product. You send a URL or click a page, and the vendor handles IP rotation, CAPTCHAs and headless browsers. That saves engineering time on proxy management, the part of a custom scraper that breaks every time target sites change their defenses. None sells a proxy network you can point your own code at, which is the first of Bright Data's six lines.

04ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee's web scraping API puts JavaScript rendering, premium proxies and Google results behind one credit pool. Hobby costs $19 a month for 75,000 credits, Freelance $49 for 250,000 and Startup $99 for 1 million, up to Enterprise plans at $5,799 for 120 million. A 1,000-credit trial needs no card.

The credit multipliers decide the real price. A plain request costs 1 credit, JavaScript rendering 5, premium proxies 10 or 25, and the stealth proxy for the hardest sites 75. On Startup, 1 million credits buy 1 million plain pages or about 13,300 stealth pages. Bright Data's Web Unlocker charges a flat $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, so a protected-site workload often costs less there. Cheap credits can cost an arm and a leg once the multipliers kick in.

ScrapingBee sells no standalone proxies and no datasets, two of Bright Data's six lines. It does ship a Google Search API, an Amazon API that returns structured data, AI extraction parameters and integrations with n8n, Make, Zapier and an MCP server. The company has been part of the Oxylabs group since June 2025, per the web scraping tools ranking.

A Capterra reviewer, Nick S., wrote in January 2026 that "credits are consumed quickly when using JavaScript rendering or advanced features, making it harder to justify for smaller projects."

Where ScrapingBee ranks →

05Octoparse

Octoparse is built for people who don't write code. You click the fields on a page in its desktop app, and it builds the workflow for extracting data, detecting lists and tables on its own. Standard costs $69 a month billed annually with 100 tasks and 3 cloud processes, and Professional $249 with 250 tasks and 20.

The free plan gives 10 tasks, local runs and 50,000 exported rows a month. Standard adds 500+ preset templates for Amazon, Google Maps and LinkedIn, and exports go to Excel, CSV, JSON, Google Sheets or a database. Every paid plan carries a 5-day money-back guarantee.

Against Bright Data, Octoparse trades scale for setup speed. Bright Data's scraping products are APIs priced per 1,000 requests, built for code running millions of pages. Octoparse's residential proxies are a $3 per GB add-on, and CAPTCHA solving costs $1 to $1.50 per 1,000. A team scraping 50 product pages a week can hit the ground running in Octoparse. A team scraping 5 million a month outgrows its 20 cloud processes.

Capterra reviewer Jerrid wrote in August 2026: "If you only scrape data occasionally, it may feel like more tool than you need."

Where Octoparse ranks →

06ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is a web scraping API that bills per credit with unlimited bandwidth on every tier. Hobby costs $49 a month for 100,000 credits, Startup $149 for 1 million and Business $299 for 3 million, with annual billing 10% off. Bright Data meters its Browser API and residential traffic per GB at up to $8, so a heavy page costs ScraperAPI the same as a light one.

One API call handles rotation across 40M+ proxies, CAPTCHAs and rendering in the same call, and a proxy port gives proxy access for code that expects one. Structured endpoints return Amazon, Google and Walmart results as JSON, an async scraper takes millions of requests in batch, and DataPipeline schedules no-code jobs. The company says it served 11 billion+ requests in the last 30 days.

The multipliers bite on search. Google and Bing calls cost 25 credits each, so 100,000 Hobby credits buy 4,000 searches, or $12.25 per 1,000. Bright Data's SERP API charges $1.50. Hobby and Startup geotarget the US and EU only, so a team covering Asia can't cut corners with a cheap plan. Bright Data's residential network spans 195 countries.

A 7-day no-questions refund and a 5,000-credit trial lower the cost of testing, which matters more than usual here. Nimble's comparison post rates ScraperAPI as a cost-effective pick for unprotected sites, and on those sites its multipliers stay at 1. One verified Trustpilot customer reported in August 2025 that a 5-credit multiplier applied after payment meant "our 60M plan was only worth 12M requests, a massive shortfall."

Where ScraperAPI ranks →

07Firecrawl

Firecrawl's web scraping API returns pages as LLM-ready markdown output, structured output in JSON or screenshots, built for AI applications that need clean data at model inference time. The yearly Standard plan costs $83 a month for 100,000 credits, which is $0.83 per 1,000 pages. Bright Data's Web Unlocker returns raw HTML at $1.50 per 1,000 requests on pay-as-you-go.

The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month and 2 concurrent requests with no card.

Hobby costs $16 a month yearly or $19 monthly for 5,000 credits, and Growth $333 yearly for 500,000. Scrape, Crawl, Map and Search each cost 1 credit per page or call, and structured extraction takes a JSON schema in the same request. The markdown output drops navigation and ads, which keeps token counts down when the page goes into a prompt. The core is open source under AGPL-3.0, so a team can self-host it.

Firecrawl misses the mark on protected sites. In a TinyFish test cited on this site, Firecrawl returned 1 success in 6 on bot-protected sites. Scrapes that return nothing aren't charged, but 403 and 404 pages still cost a credit, and credits on Hobby to Growth don't roll over. Firecrawl sells no proxy network and no datasets, so it fits AI data collection on open pages best.

A G2 reviewer, Arun A., wrote in November 2026: "The main downside for us is credit planning."

Where Firecrawl ranks →

08Diffbot

Diffbot sells the web already structured, as pre-collected web data you query, with structured extraction run on its side. Its Knowledge Graph holds 10 billion+ entities (companies, people, articles and products), queryable by filters such as city and employee count. Bright Data sells the network and scrapers to collect pages yourself, plus 190+ ready-made web data sets.

The free plan gives 10,000 credits a month at 5 requests a minute. Startup costs $299 a month for 250,000 credits, and Plus $899 for 1 million credits, 25 active crawls and 3 seats. Vendr tracks Diffbot at a $28,320 median contract, within $1,400 of Bright Data's $27,000.

Diffbot's Extract API parses any page by computer vision without per-site rules, its Natural Language API pulls entities and sentiment from text, and its own web search index answers in under 300ms at P90. It sells no proxies, no unblocker and no browser. Crawling a site needs the $899 Plus plan, so a small team on the fence should test Extract on the free tier first. Overage bills pro rata at the plan's credit rate, and the Free plan returns HTTP 429 at its limit.

A Capterra reviewer wrote in 2018 that "the initial output was generally pretty convoluted which required a lot of cleaning before being usable." The review is eight years old, so test the current Extract output on your own pages.

Where Diffbot ranks →

Two narrower buys: an extraction API at $1 per 1,000 and a $25 search results API

Both tools in this group replace one of Bright Data's request products and nothing else. Nimble prices extraction below Web Unlocker, and SerpApi prices search results above the SERP API with a legal guarantee attached. Both return structured output, so neither needs a parser on your side.

09Nimble

Nimble's Extract, Crawl and Map APIs cost $1 per 1,000 requests on pay-as-you-go, against $1.50 for Bright Data's Web Unlocker. Its Search API starts at $1.10 per 1,000 on the Lite tier, and pre-built templates for popular sites cost $3 per 1,000. A free tier covers 5,000 requests a month across every API. Nimble pitches live web data and structured web data for AI agents, the same audience Bright Data courts.

The subscriptions are a different buy. Startup costs $2,500 a month, Scale $7,000 and Professional $15,000, all billed annually, so the smallest commitment is $30,000 a year, and the annual term is set in stone. That sits above Bright Data's $27,000 Vendr median. The subscriptions add agents for multi-step research workflows, page credits and storage.

Proxies are the other gap. Nimble's residential network covers 250+ countries, but it is sold through sales after KYC checks and is closed to self-service accounts, and Nimble publishes no pool size, so raw proxy access means you contact sales and wait. Bright Data sells datacenter, ISP and residential proxies from the dashboard, with KYC required only for new residential zones.

A G2 reviewer in biotechnology noted in August 2024 that "Nimble does not provide data center proxies." Nimble's review on this site is in progress.

10SerpApi

SerpApi sells one thing, search engine results as structured JSON, and does it by the book. Its Legal Shield assumes up to $2 million of liability for collecting public search data on the customer's behalf. Bright Data publishes no equivalent guarantee for its SERP API.

The guarantee costs more per search. Production costs $150 a month for 15,000 searches, $10 per 1,000, against Bright Data's $1.50 pay-as-you-go SERP rate. Starter costs $25 for 1,000 searches, and a free plan gives 250 a month. Cached, errored and failed searches aren't counted, and a full refund is available within 7 days when under 20% of the plan is used.

SerpApi covers Google plus other engines and marketplaces, with proxies, a browser cluster and CAPTCHA solving built in, and an uptime SLA of 99.95% on all plans. Hourly throughput caps at 20% of plan volume, so keep an eye on bursts. A Capterra reviewer, Omar, wrote in July 2026 that support was "only accessible by email."

SerpApi has no page on this site yet. The SERP API pricing report compares its rates with Bright Data's and DataForSEO's.

Two residential proxy sellers below Bright Data's $8 per GB list rate

Both tools in this group sell the first of Bright Data's six lines, proxy networks, and undercut its list price per GB. Each runs a smaller proxy network than Bright Data. Decodo states 115M+ residential IPs and IPRoyal 64M+, against Bright Data's 400M+, and both sell mobile proxies too.

11Decodo

Decodo, renamed from Smartproxy, sells residential proxy access at $4 per GB pay-as-you-go, falling to $2.75 on the 100 GB plan and $2 at 1 TB. Bright Data lists residential at $8 per GB pay-as-you-go and matches $4 only with its RESIGB50 code, 50% off for three months.

The entry plan is small. Three GB cost $11.25 a month on the full 115M+ pool, so a team can test a target before committing a cent more. Decodo also sells 10M+ mobile IPs, 500K+ datacenter IPs, a Site Unblocker from $10 per GB and a Web Data API, a web scraping API with 100+ scraping templates from $19 a month. Nimble's comparison post recommends Decodo for mid-market teams that want predictable pricing.

The trial terms need care, or the refund window slips under the radar. A 3-day residential trial gives 100 MB and rolls into a paid plan unless cancelled, and taking the trial voids the 14-day money-back guarantee on the first purchase. Decodo sells no hosted browser and no dataset marketplace.

A G2 reviewer, Walid B., wrote in September 2026 that "there is no self-service button in the dashboard to refresh or swap an assigned IP address directly."

Decodo has no page on this site yet. The residential proxies pricing report sets its tiers against Bright Data's.

12IPRoyal

IPRoyal's residential traffic never expires, which ends the wasted spend of a monthly plan that resets on the 1st. A team buys gigabytes and uses them over months, at $7.35 for 1 GB pay-as-you-go or $7 on subscription, falling to $5.25 at 10 GB and $1.75 per GB past 10 TB. Bright Data's monthly plans bill on the 1st, and unused traffic doesn't roll over.

The pool is 64M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries, about a sixth of Bright Data's 400M+. IPRoyal also sells 500K+ ISP proxies from $2.70 per 30 days, 4.5M+ mobile IPs and datacenter proxies in 60+ locations, with sticky sessions up to 7 days. A Web Unblocker and a YouTube scraper API are new in 2026.

The price table has a hole. No self-serve tier sits between 10 GB and 10 TB, so a team buying 500 GB a month has to contact sales, which is back to square one for anyone who chose IPRoyal for its self-serve checkout. IPRoyal lists no free trial and no refund terms on its pricing page. A Trustpilot customer flagged payment fees, per the proxy pricing report.

An incentivized TrustRadius reviewer wrote: "I also love that I am not tied to any contracts."

What a Bright Data replacement has to cover, from proxy infrastructure to pre-built datasets

Bright Data offers six product lines, and most teams pay for two or three of them. List the lines on your own invoice before comparing the best Bright Data alternatives, because a buyer replacing the SERP API alone has a $25 option, and a buyer replacing all six has one full match in Oxylabs. Splitting the work across two vendors avoids putting all your eggs in one basket, at the cost of two invoices.

• Proxy infrastructure: residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter IPs, with proxy selection by country, city or ASN and proxy rotation per request or per session. Decodo, IPRoyal and Oxylabs sell this proxy infrastructure directly.
• Unblocking: Web Unlocker retries, rotates and solves CAPTCHAs so a request returns a page even with an IP blocked by the target. Nimble, ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI sell the closest web data products, each a web scraping API with proxy rotation built in.
• Browser automation: Bright Data's Scraping Browser, now sold as the Browser API, runs headless Chrome on Bright Data's servers at $8 per GB.
• Pre-built scrapers: the Web Scraper API returns structured data from 1,200+ websites. Apify's store and Octoparse's templates are the closest pre-built scrapers on this page.
• SERP API: search results as structured output, matched by DataForSEO and SerpApi.
• Pre-built datasets: 190+ pre-collected datasets for structured data delivery without running a scraper, matched in part by Diffbot.

The split that matters most is build or buy. Building custom scrapers on raw proxy infrastructure keeps the per-page cost low and spends engineering time on retries and parsers. Pre-built scrapers and pre-built datasets move that work to the vendor and charge per record. Teams that collect data from five sites usually build, and teams that collect data from 500 usually buy.

Count the pages of web data you pull each month before any of this, since data collection volume decides which pricing model wins. A team pulling 100,000 pages a month spends about $150 on Bright Data's Web Unlocker. At that scale, the cheapest scraping API on this page saves less than an hour of engineering time a month, so switching for price alone is a wild goose chase.

Pricing across the roster: what each Bright Data alternative costs

Bright Data prices by product line, and so do most of its rivals, which makes a single headline number misleading. Pricing models split three ways, per GB, per 1,000 requests and per credit, and each rewards a different workload. The table lines up each tool's cheapest paid entry, its unit price where one exists, and the closest Bright Data product. All prices come from the vendors' own pricing pages, read on 9 November 2026.

Vendr tracks a median Bright Data contract of $27,000 a year, with a range of $2,500 to $54,120. Diffbot's $28,320 median is the only other figure Vendr tracks for this roster. SpendHound lists none of the 13 vendors. For the other 11, a year at entry list price runs from $84 (one GB a month on IPRoyal) to $30,000 (Nimble Startup), which shows how wide the band of Bright Data alternatives runs.

Two Bright Data promotions skew any comparison. RESIGB50 halves residential to $4 per GB for three months, and a first-deposit match adds up to $500. Price a rival against the rate you'll pay in month four, at list. Money doesn't grow on trees, and a promo that halves year one does nothing for year two.

Check the list rate you will pay in month four

Price Bright Data at list

The pricing page shows list and promo rates side by side, and the 5,000 monthly free credits cover a test run on the request-based products before any deposit.

Start with monthly free credits →

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Free plans and trials across the roster

Bright Data's free tier gives 5,000 credits a month across Web Unlocker, the SERP API, Web Scraper API, Scraper Studio and Browser API. Proxies are excluded, and get a one-time $2 credit for 7 days. Eleven of the 12 alternatives give something away before a card goes on file.

• Ongoing free plans: DataForSEO's free Sandbox, Apify ($5 of usage a month), Octoparse (50,000 rows a month, local only), Firecrawl (1,000 credits a month), Diffbot (10,000 credits a month), Nimble (5,000 requests a month), SerpApi (250 searches a month)
• One-off trials and credits: Oxylabs ($5 credit), DataForSEO ($1 credit), ScrapingBee (1,000 credits), ScraperAPI (7 days, 5,000 credits), Decodo (3 days, 100 MB residential)
• Nothing listed: IPRoyal

The free tier that fits depends on the job. A search workload gets the most from SerpApi's 250 searches or DataForSEO's $1 credit, which buys about 1,600 Standard results. A scraping workload gets the most from Diffbot's 10,000 credits or Nimble's 5,000 requests. A proxy test gets the least anywhere, a needle in a haystack of fine print, since Bright Data's $2 and Decodo's 100 MB both run out in an hour of real traffic.

Compliance and privacy posture across the roster

Enterprise buyers ask for certifications before a pilot, and the roster splits sharply. Bright Data states ISO 27001, SOC 2 and SOC 3 certification, plus GDPR and CCPA compliance. Bright Data's own comparison of scraping APIs lists ISO 27001 for Oxylabs and Zyte and GDPR statements from ScraperAPI, ZenRows and ScrapingBee. Oxylabs' SOC 2 scope covers two products, per the Oxylabs comparison.

Know-your-customer checks are the second axis. Bright Data's new residential zones require a company-only, human-reviewed KYC check, and personal-email accounts can't get residential access at all. Oxylabs publishes an approval rate near 75%. Nimble sells proxies only after KYC and a sales call. The self-serve proxy sellers, Decodo and IPRoyal, let a buyer start from a pricing page.

SerpApi puts money behind its legal position, with a Legal Shield covering up to $2 million. It is the one indemnity on the 12 vendors' home and pricing pages, read on 9 November 2026. For a team in a regulated industry skating on thin ice with a regulator, that leaves a short list: Bright Data or Oxylabs for proxies, and SerpApi for search.

Where each vendor's proxy IPs come from

A residential proxy is someone's home connection used for web data requests, and real residential IPs are what let a request pass for a person.

How a vendor recruits those homes is the elephant in the room for this market. Bright Data's network began as Luminati, the paid side of Hola VPN. In 2015, Hola was caught selling its free users' bandwidth as exit nodes through Luminati at $20 a gigabyte. Bright Data was renamed from Luminati in 2021 and has been owned by EMK Capital since 2017.

Today Bright Data sources residential IPs through its SDK, shipped inside third-party apps behind an opt-in screen, and says every peer can leave in a couple of steps. In June 2026, Include Security research found the SDK inside free smart-TV apps, with a peer tunnel lacking real authentication and iOS traffic bypassing a configured VPN. Bright Data called the VPN behavior an unintended bug and said it was updating the software.

Its CTO, Efim Dimenstein, answered the wider claims in a company post arguing that Hola operates peer-server-peer, with every request routed through Bright Data's servers. Spur, which tracks proxy networks, still lists Hola VPN users as the largest source of IPs in the pool.

Across the rest of the roster, Oxylabs, Decodo and IPRoyal sell residential pools you can ask the same questions of. ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee run proxies inside the API and sell no access to the pool, and Firecrawl routes requests through its own Fire-engine infrastructure. DataForSEO and Diffbot sell no proxy network.

How to test success rates before switching

Bright Data cites a 98.87% average success rate on its own blog, and the Oxylabs comparison found neither Bright Data nor Oxylabs publishes an independently audited benchmark. Your target sites decide the real figure, so build the test around them. A vendor's average web data success rate says little about your own target websites, and the operating cost per usable page says a lot.

1. Pick 1,000 URLs from the sites you scrape today: 400 easy pages, 400 behind bot protection, and 200 search results pages.
2. Run all 1,000 through Bright Data and through two alternatives on their free tiers or trials, on the same day and from the same region.
3. Count three numbers per vendor: pages returned with the data you need, median response time, and credits or gigabytes consumed.
4. Divide spend by usable pages to get a price per 1,000 usable pages, and compare that with Bright Data's $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests.
5. Repeat the protected-site batch a week later, since anti-bot systems change faster than vendor pricing pages. A vendor that passes once and fails the rerun is a flash in the pan.

A vendor that bills failed requests, as Firecrawl does for 403 and 404 pages, shows up in step 4 as a higher price per usable page. A vendor that bills only successes, as Bright Data, DataForSEO and SerpApi do, keeps steps 3 and 4 close together.

Questions buyers ask about Bright Data alternatives

Which is better, Bright Data or Oxylabs?

Bright Data has the larger residential pool, 400M+ IPs against 175M+, and a self-serve dataset marketplace from $250 per 100,000 records. Oxylabs is cheaper at volume, with residential falling to $2.50 per GB past 1,000 GB at list, and it won a Federal Circuit appeal over two Bright Data patents, final in February 2026.

Is Bright Data trustworthy?

Bright Data is a private company founded in 2014 as Luminati Networks and owned by EMK Capital since 2017. It states ISO 27001, SOC 2 and SOC 3 certification and won court cases brought by Meta and X Corp. Its residential network's origin in Hola VPN, and 2026 research on its smart-TV SDK, are the main criticisms.

Is proxy scraping legal?

Scraping public, logged-off data has held up in US courts, including Meta v. Bright Data in January 2024. Logged-in scraping, personal data under GDPR and terms you accepted with an account are separate questions, and none of the rulings settles them. Ask a lawyer about your specific targets.

How much does Bright Data cost?

Web Unlocker, the SERP API and Web Scraper API cost $1.50 per 1,000 on pay-as-you-go, or $499 a month for about 380,000. Residential proxies list at $8 per GB, with monthly plans from $499 for 141 GB. Vendr's median Bright Data contract is $27,000 a year.

Who are Bright Data's main competitors?

Oxylabs is the direct competitor across all six product lines. Decodo and IPRoyal compete on residential proxies, ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee, Firecrawl and Nimble on scraping APIs, SerpApi and DataForSEO on search results, and Apify, Octoparse and Diffbot on ready-made scrapers and data.

Which proxy provider is best for web scraping?

Residential proxies get blocked least and cost most, from $1.75 to $8 per GB on this page. Datacenter proxies are cheapest, from $0.60 per GB at Bright Data, and work on unprotected sites. For protected sites, an unblocker billed per successful request, such as Web Unlocker at $1.50 per 1,000, often costs less than raw residential traffic.

Who founded Bright Data?

Bright Data grew out of Hola, the VPN company, and launched as Luminati Networks in 2014. It was renamed Bright Data in 2021. Its CEO is Or Lenchner, and EMK Capital has owned the company since 2017.

What is the cheapest Bright Data alternative?

For residential proxies, Decodo at $11.25 a month for 3 GB is the most reasonable price on this page. For search results, DataForSEO at $0.60 per 1,000 Standard pages. For scraping, Firecrawl at $16 a month yearly, or Octoparse's free plan for 50,000 rows a month.