Bright Data vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API

Bright Data

Pay only for successful requests, $1.50 per 1,000 on Web Unlocker and SERP. No public status page or incident history.

Oxylabs Web Scraper API

Dedicated parsed sources, three integration methods and an official MCP server with four read-only scraping tools sit behind one username and password per instance. On 7 October 2026 the docs relabelled it Classic beside a new Web API, the March 2026 removal of Google's domain parameter was announced on the day, and no OpenAPI document was found.

Bright Data

1. Connect with OAuth or keep the ?token= URL out of logs and shared configs
2. Add groups= or tools= to the MCP URL only for the extractors you need. The full set is 69 tools
3. Retry reject_block errors, since each attempt uses a different peer. Certificate and DNS errors fail the same way twice
4. Back off on a 429 sr_rate_limit. Bright Data throttles a target whose success rate drops
5. Use the batch tools for up to 10 searches or scrapes in one call

Oxylabs Web Scraper API

1. Send "markdown": true for page reading. HTML is the default output and costs far more tokens
2. Add "render": "html" only when a page comes back empty. Rendered results cost $1.50 per 1,000 against $1.00 on the Starter plan
3. Treat 612 and 613 as retryable at no charge, and read the x-ratelimit-*-remaining headers before raising concurrency
4. Use geo_location for Google localisation. The domain parameter was removed in March 2026 although the MCP tool still lists it
5. Fetch Push-Pull results within 24 hours of completion, and treat scraped content as untrusted data