Oxylabs alternative 2026: Spider vs Web Scraper API

Oxylabs is a proxy company that sells a scraping API on top of its network. If your work is Amazon or Google at volume, or you already run your own crawler and only want a residential pool, Oxylabs is built for you. Its Web Scraper API is a monthly plan with a per-result rate that depends on the target and on whether you asked for JavaScript rendering, and AI extraction is a second product, AI Studio, with its own credits.

Spider is a research lab for web data quality. The question we ask of every page is whether the returned content is complete and usable, and the API is built around that: one endpoint, http, smart or chrome mode as a request parameter, markdown or HTML back, and a bill that is bandwidth plus compute rather than a plan. The verdict for most teams reading this: if you need a proxy pool or a maintained Amazon parser, Oxylabs. If you need clean pages from many different sites, at any volume, without choosing a plan first, Spider.

Side by side

Oxylabs prices are as of September 2026 from its pricing page. The Spider figure is our own estimate from the pricing guide, not independently verified. The full cross-vendor table lives on /compare/.

What Oxylabs costs

Oxylabs merged its SERP, e-commerce and general scrapers into one Web Scraper API, so there is now one plan table. Plans are monthly only, with no annual option and no rollover statement, and you are billed per successful result, which Oxylabs defines as a 2xx or 4xx response.

The “results included” column assumes the cheapest target. The rate you pay depends on what you scrape:

Top-ups above the plan are capped at $249 on Micro and $499 on Starter. All figures as of September 2026, from the Web Scraper API pricing page.

So the headline “from $0.50 per 1,000” only applies to Amazon. A general website costs $1.15 per 1,000 on Micro, and turning on rendering takes it to $1.35. That is 2.7 times the number on the banner, and it is the number most readers of this post will pay.

Three worked volumes, general websites, no rendering:

• 10,000 pages: metered usage would be $11.50, but Micro’s $49 minimum applies, so $49.
• 100,000 pages: Starter at $99 covers 90,000 results at $1.10, plus an $11 top-up, so about $110.
• 1,000,000 pages: usage at Business rates is $750, under the $999 minimum, so $999. With rendering, about $1,000.

AI Studio is a separate subscription: Starter $12 a month for 3,000 credits, Lite $62 for 100,000, Standard $250 for 500,000, Custom from $1,200. A job without JavaScript costs 1 credit, with JavaScript 4, and each AI prompt 10. Extracting from a rendered page with a prompt is therefore 14 credits, so the Lite plan covers about 7,100 such pages, roughly $8.70 per 1,000. As of September 2026, from the AI Studio pricing page.

If you only want the proxies, residential starts at $30 a month for 5 GB ($6 per GB) and drops to $2.50 per GB on the $2,500 Corporate plan, as of September 2026 from the residential pricing page.

What Spider costs for the same work

Spider bills $1 per GB of content transferred plus $0.0001 per CPU minute. There is no plan to pick, JavaScript rendering rolls into compute, and a request that returns an error costs $0. For a mixed workload that comes to about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode by our own estimate, not independently verified. A 10,000 page month in http mode is about $0.80 to $1.00, and 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata is about $80 to $160. The pricing guide shows the arithmetic per endpoint.

Credits never expire, so a project that runs 10,000 pages one month and nothing the next pays for 10,000 pages. Teams that want a flat monthly bill can buy concurrency instead through Unlimited, from $40 a month, with a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go.

What we could not verify

There is no published head-to-head benchmark of Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API against Spider on a shared URL list, so this post makes no success-rate claim for either API. The best independent data point on Oxylabs is Proxyway’s review, updated August 21, 2026, which scores the company 9.3 out of 10 and measures 99.93% success on the residential proxy pool. That is a proxy measurement, not a Web Scraper API measurement, and the two can differ a lot because the API adds parsing and rendering on top of the network. An earlier version of this post quoted a third-party latency figure for the API that we can no longer source, so it is gone.

Oxylabs’ own page says the residential pool has 175M+ IPs across 195 locations with an average 99.95% success rate. Those are vendor claims; we have not tested them. Our own numbers carry the same caveat: the Spider cost band above is our estimate, and our Spider Browser dataset shows a 100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains from February 2026, which measures browser rendering, not this API.

Where Oxylabs wins

The proxy network is the product, and it is a good one by Proxyway’s measurement. If you need a residential or mobile pool for your own crawler, ad verification or price monitoring with your own parser, that is what Oxylabs sells and Spider does not try to match it as a standalone offering.

Amazon and Google have their own rates and parsed JSON output. If those two targets are most of your volume, $0.30 to $0.50 per 1,000 Amazon results on the higher plans is cheap for maintained parsers you never have to fix.

Push-Pull gives you an async job model with callbacks out of the box, and a proxy endpoint mode lets legacy code that speaks HTTP proxy use the API without a rewrite.

The Business plan’s 100 requests per second, plus a sales team that will negotiate Custom+ from $0.25 per 1,000, suits procurement-driven buyers who want a contract and an account manager.

Where Spider wins

Quality on unfamiliar sites. Oxylabs’ parsers cover the targets it has written parsers for; everything else comes back as raw HTML or a rendered page for you to extract from. Spider returns markdown, text or HTML from any URL, with metadata, and the /crawl endpoint follows links from a start page with a limit so one request replaces a spider you would otherwise write.

No plan to size. A 10,000 page month costs about a dollar on Spider and $49 on Oxylabs, because Micro is the floor. At 100,000 pages the gap is roughly $110 against $8 to $15 by our estimate. At a million pages Oxylabs is $999 to $1,000 and Spider is about $80 to $160 in chrome mode. Every one of those Spider figures is our own estimate, not independently verified, and your bandwidth per page will move it.

One rate for rendering. On Oxylabs, rendering is a per-result surcharge you opt into. Spider’s smart mode renders only the pages that need it and charges the compute that ran, so you are not paying the rendered rate on pages that were static all along.

Open source. The engine is MIT licensed at spider-rs/spider and you can run it yourself. Oxylabs publishes its SDKs and MCP server under MIT, but the scraper itself is closed.

Default throughput of 10,000 requests per minute on every account, with Unlimited available when you want to buy concurrency instead of metering.

Migration: the same task in both SDKs

Fetch a rendered product page and get the content back. Oxylabs’ quick start uses the Realtime endpoint with HTTP basic auth; Spider’s Python client takes an API key.

Oxylabs:

import requests

payload = {
    "source": "universal",
    "url": "https://example.com/products/1",
    "render": "html",
}

response = requests.post(
    "https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries",
    auth=("OXYLABS_USERNAME", "OXYLABS_PASSWORD"),
    json=payload,
)

html = response.json()["results"][0]["content"]

Spider:

from spider import Spider

client = Spider(api_key="SPIDER_API_KEY")

pages = client.scrape_url(
    "https://example.com/products/1",
    params={"request": "smart", "return_format": "markdown"},
)

print(pages[0]["content"])

The Spider call returns markdown with the page metadata in the same object, so there is no parsing step before the content is usable in a RAG index or an LLM prompt. To fetch a whole catalog, switch scrape_url to crawl_url and add "limit": 100; the scrape endpoint reference lists the other parameters, including request: "chrome" for pages that always need a browser.

When to pick which

Pick Oxylabs when the target list is Amazon and Google, when you need a residential proxy pool for your own tooling, or when a $49 to $999 monthly plan is easier to get approved than a metered bill.

Pick Spider when the target list is long and changes, when the output needs to be markdown or structured text rather than HTML, when volume is bursty enough that a monthly minimum hurts, or when you want to self-host the same engine the cloud runs. Two sibling posts cover the other proxy-first vendors: Spider vs Bright Data and Spider vs Zyte.

The quickest way to settle it is to take one URL you care about and run the same request through the playground and through the Oxylabs trial, then compare what came back before you compare the bills.