IPRoyal vs Oxylabs: Which provider is better? [2026]

If you're weighing IPRoyal vs Oxylabs, you're really weighing price against performance. One is the budget pick that's grown fast since 2020. The other is a Lithuanian enterprise provider charging accordingly since 2015.

I've tested both across projects of varying scale. From 10k-request proof-of-concept runs to sustained six-figure-page crawls.

This IPRoyal vs Oxylabs breakdown covers where each provider actually wins, where the marketing doesn't match reality, and which one makes sense for your workload.

IPRoyal vs Oxylabs: What's the Difference?

The main difference between IPRoyal and Oxylabs is that IPRoyal offers budget-friendly proxies with non-expiring traffic and no monthly commitments, while Oxylabs provides a larger IP pool (175M+ vs 32M+) and faster response times at a higher price.

IPRoyal is better for cost-conscious scraping and smaller projects. Oxylabs wins when you need top-tier reliability, ZIP-code-level targeting, or dedicated account management at scale.

Side-by-Side Comparison

That table tells the high-level story, but the numbers don't mean much without context. Let's dig into each dimension that actually matters when you're building scrapers.

Oxylabs Has a Bigger Pool — and That Actually Matters

Pool size isn't just a vanity metric. A 175M+ IP residential pool versus 32M+ means Oxylabs can rotate through roughly 5x more unique addresses before an IP repeats on the same target.

For scraping sites with aggressive fingerprinting — Amazon, LinkedIn, anything behind Cloudflare — that difference translates directly to success rates.

Third-party testing from Proxyway and Scrape.do confirms this. Oxylabs consistently hits 99.8%+ success rates. IPRoyal lands in the 93–98% range depending on the target.

That said, pool size is only relevant at scale. If you're pulling 5k pages a day from a moderately protected site, IPRoyal's 32M pool is more than sufficient. You won't exhaust it.

Where pool size bites you is on hard targets. If a site keeps a rolling blacklist and your pool overlaps with other IPRoyal customers hitting the same domain, you'll burn through "clean" IPs faster.

IPRoyal Is Meaningfully Cheaper — With a Catch

Here's where IPRoyal makes its strongest argument. The per-GB pricing at various volume tiers:

At small volumes, the difference is modest. At 100GB+, IPRoyal is roughly half the price.

That's significant for large-scale price monitoring or SERP tracking where bandwidth consumption is high but target difficulty is moderate.

The catch: IPRoyal's lower success rates mean more retries for the same data. If Oxylabs succeeds 99.8% of the time and IPRoyal hits 95%, you're retrying roughly 5% of requests with IPRoyal.

On a 100GB crawl, that's ~5GB of wasted bandwidth — narrowing the real cost gap more than the per-GB rate suggests.

Factor in response time too. Oxylabs returns results in 0.4–0.6 seconds. IPRoyal takes 1.2–3.5 seconds. On a 100k-request job, that time difference compounds into hours of extra crawl time.

Setting Up Proxies: Both Are Straightforward

Neither provider will slow you down during integration. Both support standard HTTP/HTTPS proxy authentication, so any HTTP client handles them.

Here's how a basic residential proxy request looks with IPRoyal in Python:

import requests

proxy_url = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@geo.iproyal.com:12321"

proxies = {
    "http": proxy_url,
    "https": proxy_url,
}

# Country targeting via username format: username-country-us
response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxies,
    timeout=30  # IPRoyal can be slower, set generous timeout
)

print(response.json())

Note the timeout=30 — with IPRoyal's longer average response times, you'll want to set this higher than you might expect to avoid premature timeouts on slower IPs.

The same request through Oxylabs:

import requests

proxy_url = "http://customer-USERNAME:PASSWORD@pr.oxylabs.io:7777"

proxies = {
    "http": proxy_url,
    "https": proxy_url,
}

# Country targeting via username: customer-USERNAME-cc-us
response = requests.get(
    "https://httpbin.org/ip",
    proxies=proxies,
    timeout=15  # Oxylabs is fast enough for tighter timeouts
)

print(response.json())

Both use the username:password@host:port format. Both support IP whitelisting as an alternative to credentials.

The integration code is near-identical. The difference is in what happens after the request leaves your machine.

Geo-Targeting: Oxylabs Wins on Precision

Both providers cover 195 countries with country, state, and city-level targeting. For most scraping tasks, that's plenty.

Oxylabs pulls ahead with ZIP code and ASN-level targeting. If you need search results from a specific US postal code — common in local SEO monitoring and ad verification — Oxylabs handles this natively.

IPRoyal stops at city level.

ASN targeting is another differentiator. Routing traffic through a specific ISP — Comcast in the US, BT in the UK — matters when your target serves different content based on the visitor's network.

Oxylabs offers ASN selection on their ISP proxies. IPRoyal doesn't.

For general-purpose scraping targeting entire countries or cities, both providers work fine. The precision gap only matters for specific use cases.

Sticky Sessions: IPRoyal Has the Edge

This is one area where IPRoyal genuinely outperforms. IPRoyal offers sticky sessions up to 7 days. Oxylabs caps residential sticky sessions at 30 minutes.

If your workflow requires maintaining the same IP across multiple pages — navigating a paginated catalog or maintaining a logged-in session — IPRoyal's longer sticky sessions are a real advantage.

Oxylabs' 30-minute cap means you'll need to handle session rotation and potential re-authentication in your code. That's not a dealbreaker, but it adds complexity.

For ISP proxies, the dynamic shifts. Oxylabs offers unlimited-duration sticky sessions on their ISP product. IPRoyal caps ISP sessions at the lease duration.

If long sessions are your primary concern, the answer depends on which proxy type you're using.

Datacenter Proxies: Different Pricing Models

Both offer dedicated datacenter proxies, but the pricing models differ.

IPRoyal charges per IP with unlimited bandwidth. Starting at $1.39/proxy/month for a 30-day lease, you get a dedicated IP you can push as hard as you want.

For high-bandwidth tasks — video scraping, downloading large datasets, bulk image collection — this flat-rate model eliminates cost surprises.

Oxylabs offers two models: per-IP (from $1.20/IP) and per-traffic (from $0.59/GB). The per-IP model is comparable to IPRoyal's but slightly cheaper per unit.

The per-traffic model makes sense if you need many IPs but don't use much bandwidth per IP.

Oxylabs also offers shared datacenter proxies, which IPRoyal doesn't. Shared proxies are cheaper but come with the downside of other users' activity potentially getting your IP flagged.

The Extra Tools Gap

Oxylabs has evolved from a pure proxy provider into a data collection platform. Beyond proxies, they offer:

• Web Scraper API — handles proxy management, retries, and parsing automatically
• Web Unblocker — AI-driven tool for bypassing bot protection
• AI Studio — natural-language interface for generating scraping configurations
• OxyCopilot — AI assistant for writing scraping and parsing logic
• Ready-made datasets — pre-scraped structured data for common use cases

IPRoyal is leaner. They've recently added a Web Unblocker (from $1.00/1,000 requests) and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, but their core offering is still proxies.

If you want raw proxy infrastructure and prefer to build your own scraping logic with Scrapy, Playwright, or Puppeteer, IPRoyal gives you what you need without extra complexity.

If you want the provider to handle anti-bot evasion and page parsing, Oxylabs' tools add genuine value. They come at additional cost, though.

Proxies are infrastructure. How you use them — the scrapers, the rotation logic, the pipelines — that's where your engineering effort should go.

Both providers give you the proxy layer. Oxylabs bundles more convenience on top.

Support and Reliability

Oxylabs offers 24/7 live chat and email support with dedicated account managers for enterprise customers. Their documentation is thorough, with code samples for Python, Node.js, Go, Java, and more.

IPRoyal also provides 24/7 support via live chat, email, and Discord. Documentation is solid but less extensive than Oxylabs'.

For a provider that launched in 2020, they've built out their help center fast.

Both have Trustpilot ratings north of 4.5 stars. Neither has a meaningful reliability problem.

The practical difference shows up when something goes wrong at scale. If you're running a million-request job and success rate tanks, Oxylabs' enterprise support will investigate specific targets and adjust routing.

IPRoyal's support is responsive but doesn't offer that same level of technical deep-dive for individual customer issues.

When IPRoyal Is the Right Choice

Pick IPRoyal when:

• Budget is your primary constraint. At $1.75/GB for bulk residential and $1.39/proxy for datacenter, IPRoyal is one of the cheapest options that still delivers real residential IPs.
• Your traffic is sporadic. Non-expiring bandwidth is a genuinely useful feature. Buy 50GB, use it over three months — no wasted spend.
• You need long sticky sessions. 7-day sticky sessions on residential proxies are rare in the industry. If your workflow depends on session persistence, IPRoyal is hard to beat.
• Your targets aren't heavily protected. For scraping sites with moderate anti-bot measures — news sites, smaller e-commerce platforms, public data portals — IPRoyal's 93–98% success rate is perfectly workable.
• You're building a proof of concept. Low entry cost with no monthly commitment lets you test your scraping architecture without locking into a subscription.

When Oxylabs Is the Right Choice

Pick Oxylabs when:

• You're scraping hard targets at scale. Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, major retailers with Cloudflare or PerimeterX — Oxylabs' 99.8% success rate and sub-second response times pay for themselves in saved retries.
• Speed matters. If you need to scrape 500k pages nightly within a window, Oxylabs' 0.4–0.6s average response time lets you finish in a fraction of the time IPRoyal would take.
• You need ZIP code or ASN-level targeting. Local SEO monitoring, ad verification, and geo-specific content testing require precision that IPRoyal doesn't offer.
• You want enterprise features. Dedicated account managers, SLAs, custom plans, and technology E&O insurance matter for companies where proxy failure has business consequences.
• Your monthly spend exceeds $500. At higher volumes, Oxylabs' enterprise pricing becomes more competitive, and you unlock features and support tiers that justify the premium.

Building a Rotation Script: IPRoyal vs Oxylabs

The integration code is near-identical, but production scraping requires retry logic and rotation handling. Here's a minimal rotation wrapper that works with either provider:

import requests
import time
from itertools import cycle

def scrape_with_rotation(urls, proxy_config, max_retries=3):
    """Scrape a list of URLs with automatic retry and rotation."""
    results = []

    for url in urls:
        for attempt in range(max_retries):
            try:
                proxies = {
                    "http": proxy_config["endpoint"],
                    "https": proxy_config["endpoint"],
                }
                response = requests.get(
                    url,
                    proxies=proxies,
                    timeout=proxy_config["timeout"],
                    headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}
                )
                if response.status_code == 200:
                    results.append({"url": url, "html": response.text})
                    break  # Success, move to next URL
            except requests.exceptions.RequestException:
                time.sleep(2 ** attempt)  # Exponential backoff

    return results

The key difference in practice is the timeout value. Set it to 15 seconds for Oxylabs and 30+ seconds for IPRoyal to account for their slower average response times.

For IPRoyal, you'd configure the proxy endpoint like this:

iproyal_config = {
    "endpoint": "http://USER:PASS@geo.iproyal.com:12321",
    "timeout": 30,
}

For Oxylabs, tighter timeouts work fine:

oxylabs_config = {
    "endpoint": "http://customer-USER:PASS@pr.oxylabs.io:7777",
    "timeout": 15,
}

Both providers rotate IPs automatically on each request when using their residential backconnect endpoint. You don't need to manage a list of individual IPs — the gateway handles rotation.

Ethical IP Sourcing: Both Pass the Bar

Both IPRoyal and Oxylabs source residential IPs through opt-in peer-to-peer networks. Real users agree to share their bandwidth in exchange for compensation.

IPRoyal sources primarily through their Pawns.app (formerly Honeygain) network. Oxylabs works with multiple vetted partners and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification for information security management.

Neither provider is doing anything shady with their IP sourcing. Both have public KYC policies and restrict access to sensitive targets like banking, entertainment streaming, and Apple domains.

This matters if you're building a scraping operation where compliance is a concern. Oxylabs' certifications and insurance coverage give them an edge in enterprise procurement.

Legal teams that scrutinize vendors will prefer Oxylabs' paper trail.

IPRoyal vs Oxylabs: Common Issues and Fixes

Running into problems is inevitable with any proxy provider. Here are the issues I've hit with each and how to resolve them.

"Connection timed out" on IPRoyal

Why: IPRoyal's pool includes some slower residential IPs. When the gateway assigns you one of these, requests can exceed default timeout values.

Fix: Increase your timeout to 30–45 seconds. If timeouts persist on a specific target, switch from country-level to city-level targeting — smaller geo-targets often route through faster IPs.

"407 Proxy Authentication Required" on Oxylabs

Why: Usually a formatting issue in the username string. Oxylabs uses a customer- prefix that's easy to forget.

Fix: Verify your username format is customer-USERNAME (not just USERNAME). Double-check that your password doesn't contain special characters that need URL encoding.

Low success rates on heavily protected sites

Why: Both providers can struggle with sites running advanced bot detection (DataDome, Kasada, PerimeterX). Standard residential proxies alone may not be enough.

Fix: Rotate your User-Agent header with each request. Add realistic delays between requests (2–5 seconds). If success rates stay below 80%, consider pairing proxies with a headless browser like Playwright instead of raw HTTP requests.

IPRoyal traffic draining faster than expected

Why: Failed requests still consume bandwidth. If your target returns large error pages or redirects, you're paying for traffic that produced no useful data.

Fix: Monitor your actual traffic consumption versus successful responses. Add response size checks in your code — if a response is under 1KB, it's likely an error page, and you should retry before counting it as consumed.

Mobile Proxies: A Quick Note

Both providers offer mobile proxies, but the pricing models differ sharply.

IPRoyal charges a flat daily or monthly fee with unlimited traffic. Starting at $10.11/day, you get a real mobile IP on 3G/4G/5G with no bandwidth cap.

For mobile-heavy use cases like social media management or app testing, this predictable pricing model is easier to budget.

Oxylabs prices mobile proxies per GB. At $9/GB (promotional rate), costs scale linearly with usage.

If you're only making a few hundred requests, Oxylabs is cheaper. If you're pushing significant traffic through mobile IPs, IPRoyal's flat rate wins.

The pool sizes aren't directly comparable. IPRoyal advertises 4.5M+ mobile IPs. Oxylabs doesn't publicize their mobile pool size separately, but it's included in their broader 175M+ network.

The Real Cost Calculation

Most IPRoyal vs Oxylabs comparisons stop at per-GB pricing. That's misleading. Here's a more honest cost model for a realistic 100k-page scraping job:

IPRoyal saves you ~$119 on this job. Oxylabs finishes it 44 hours sooner.

Which matters more depends on your situation. If you're running a nightly crawl that has to finish before 6 AM, time wins. If you're running an ad-hoc research project with no deadline, cost wins.

What Reddit Users Say About IPRoyal and Oxylabs

Reddit threads about proxy providers tend to be more honest than review sites. Here's the general sentiment from r/webscraping, r/scrapingtheweb, and r/datamining.

IPRoyal on Reddit: Users consistently praise the pricing and non-expiring traffic. The most common complaint is slower speeds compared to premium providers. Several threads recommend IPRoyal specifically for beginners and budget-constrained projects.

Oxylabs on Reddit: Users describe the proxies as fast and reliable. The recurring criticism is price — multiple threads mention Oxylabs being too expensive for solo developers or small teams. The mandatory phone number and KYC during signup also comes up as a friction point.

One pattern worth noting: Reddit users who've tried both tend to keep IPRoyal for low-stakes scraping and Oxylabs (or Bright Data) for hard targets. That aligns with what I've seen in testing.

Is IPRoyal Reliable?

Yes, with caveats. IPRoyal holds a 4.6/5 on Trustpilot with 2,600+ reviews and a 4.6/5 on G2. Users praise the pricing, ease of setup, and responsive customer support.

The reliability concerns come from the smaller IP pool. Some users report that on heavily targeted sites, IPRoyal's IPs get flagged more often than premium alternatives.

This isn't a reliability failure — it's a pool size limitation.

For the price point, IPRoyal delivers consistent uptime (99.9%+ claimed, and close to that in practice). If your targets aren't aggressively blocking traffic, it's a dependable choice.

The main risk: IPRoyal sources IPs through their Pawns.app P2P network. Some users have raised questions about this model's long-term IP quality.

It hasn't caused measurable problems in my testing, but it's worth knowing about.

Is Oxylabs Legit?

Yes. Oxylabs is one of the most established proxy providers in the market. Founded in 2015 in Lithuania, they serve 4,000+ clients including Fortune 500 companies.

Oxylabs holds a 4.3/5 on Trustpilot and 4.5/5 on G2. They're ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, carry Technology E&O and Cyber insurance, and maintain public KYC policies.

The legitimacy question usually comes from pricing. At $8/GB for pay-as-you-go residential proxies, people wonder if the premium is justified.

For enterprise use cases demanding 99.8%+ success rates and sub-second response times, it is.

Where Oxylabs gets dinged in reviews: signup requires a phone number and KYC verification. Some products can't be purchased without contacting sales.

That's friction for individual developers, but standard practice for enterprise vendors.

How IPRoyal and Oxylabs Compare to Bright Data and Decodo

People searching IPRoyal vs Oxylabs often also consider Bright Data (formerly Luminati) and Decodo (formerly Smartproxy). Here's where all four stand:

Bright Data offers the largest feature set — pre-built scrapers, dataset marketplace, browser extension — but comes with the highest complexity and cost. If you need both proxies and managed scraping infrastructure, Bright Data competes with Oxylabs at the enterprise tier.

Decodo (Smartproxy's rebrand) sits in a sweet spot many people miss. Larger pool than IPRoyal, competitive with Oxylabs on success rates, and significantly cheaper than both Oxylabs and Bright Data. If neither IPRoyal nor Oxylabs feels right, Decodo is the obvious third option to test.

IPRoyal vs Oxylabs: Onboarding and Registration

This is an underrated difference that affects your first-day experience.

IPRoyal: Email-only registration. No phone number, no KYC for most products. You can go from signup to making proxy requests in under two minutes. Pay-as-you-go with no minimum commitment.

Oxylabs: Requires a phone number at signup. KYC verification is mandatory before you can use any services. Some products (enterprise residential, custom plans) require contacting sales. Expect 15–30 minutes before you're fully set up.

If you're evaluating proxies for a quick prototype, IPRoyal's zero-friction onboarding is a genuine advantage.

If you're procuring for a company with a vendor approval process, Oxylabs' formal onboarding actually works in your favor. It signals the compliance posture your legal team expects.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the alternative to IPRoyal?

The closest alternatives depend on what you need. For a similar budget with a larger pool, look at Decodo (from $3.50/GB).

For enterprise-grade performance, Oxylabs and Bright Data are the standard picks. Other options include SOAX, NetNut, and Webshare.

Who are Oxylabs' main competitors?

Oxylabs competes primarily with Bright Data at the enterprise tier. Both offer 100M+ IP pools, scraping APIs, and dedicated account management.

At the mid-market level, Decodo and SOAX compete on price-to-performance. IPRoyal competes at the budget end.

Can I use IPRoyal and Oxylabs together?

Yes, and it's a smart strategy. Use IPRoyal for high-volume, low-difficulty targets where cost per GB matters most. Use Oxylabs for hard targets where success rate justifies the premium.

Your scraping code just needs to route requests through different proxy endpoints based on the target domain.

Do IPRoyal or Oxylabs work for sneaker bots?

IPRoyal offers dedicated sneaker proxies optimized for Nike and Supreme. Oxylabs doesn't have a specific sneaker product, but their residential and ISP proxies work for this use case.

For sneaker-specific needs, IPRoyal is the more direct fit.

Which provider has better documentation?

Oxylabs wins here. Their docs cover Python, Node.js, Go, Java, C#, and PHP with full code samples. They also offer a Web Scraper API Playground for testing.

IPRoyal's docs are functional but more basic — they cover the essentials without Oxylabs' depth.

Wrapping Up

IPRoyal and Oxylabs aren't competing for the same customer.

IPRoyal is the best budget option in the residential proxy space. Non-expiring traffic, no contracts, and pricing that undercuts almost everyone.

Oxylabs is the premium pick — backed by the infrastructure, speed, and reliability to justify higher prices.

For developers starting out or running cost-sensitive projects, IPRoyal gets you production-quality residential IPs without the enterprise price tag.

For teams running mission-critical scraping at scale, Oxylabs' performance advantages compound into real time and reliability gains.

If you're somewhere in the middle, test both. Buy a small package from each, run identical jobs against your specific targets.

Measure success rate, speed, and cost-per-successful-request. Benchmarks are averages — your mileage will vary.