Shifter vs Oxylabs
Looking for an Oxylabs alternative? These two networks finished closer than any other pair we tested. Shifter led the United Kingdom and Canada on live IPs, reached more networks in four of the five countries, and answered faster everywhere, at a fraction of Oxylabs' enterprise rate.
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Enterprise coverage without the enterprise invoice
Lowest published rate per GB from each provider. Oxylabs reaches $2.50 only on its 1 TB Corporate plan at $2,500 a month.
| Monthly volume | Shifter | Oxylabs | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | $10 5 GB at $2.00/GB | $30 5 GB at $6.00/GB | 67% |
| 20 GB | $30 $1.50/GB | $100 $5.00/GB | 70% |
| 100 GB | $100 $1.00/GB | $500 125 GB at $4.00/GB | 75% |
| Best rate | $0.75/GB from 200 GB | $2.50/GB 1 TB at $2,500/mo | 70% |
Live IPs online during the test
Distinct IPs each network had live and reachable at test time, not the size of its total network. Residential IPs rotate all day, so both providers serve far more addresses across 24 hours.
Every metric, country by country
Pick a country to see the complete measurement, including the numbers that did not go our way.
| Metric | Shifter | Oxylabs |
|---|---|---|
| Requests sent | 250,000 | 250,000 |
| Live IPs during the test | 136,667 | 140,811 |
| Unique networks (ASNs) | 1,606 | 1,591 |
| Unique cities | 5,813 | 6,049 |
| Average latency | 364 ms | 752 ms |
| Success rate | 99.8% | 99.9% |
The tightest single result in the benchmark. Shifter reached more networks than Oxylabs, 1,606 against 1,591, and answered in 364 ms against 752 ms. Oxylabs held only 2.9% more live IPs, at more than three times the price per GB.
How we measured this
Every request opened a fresh connection through each provider's rotating residential gateway and asked an IP echo service which address it came from. Because the gateway assigns a new exit on each connection, the count of distinct addresses shows how much of the pool was reachable at that moment.
Oxylabs and Shifter received identical request counts, the same concurrency of 1,000, the same 10 second timeout and the same target, run one at a time from a single server so neither absorbed the other's bandwidth.
Volumes were fixed per country and matched across both providers, from 60,000 requests in the smallest market to 250,000 in the United States, 560,000 per provider in total.
What these numbers mean
These counts are the IPs each network had live and reachable while the test ran, not the size of its network. Residential IPs rotate all day as consumer devices join and leave, so both providers serve far more addresses over 24 hours than any single test can see. The figure that constrains a crawl is how many are online simultaneously, and that is what we counted. Sample sizes differ by country, so compare the two providers within a country rather than across them.
Why use Shifter residential proxies?
Same coverage, a third of the rate
Oxylabs starts at $6.00 per GB and reaches $2.50 only on a 1 TB commitment. Shifter starts at $2.00 and falls to $0.75, with the two networks separated by single digits on live IPs.
Ahead in the UK and Canada
53,506 live British IPs against 46,394 and 33,485 Canadian against 28,783, the two clearest country wins in this pairing.
More networks in four of five
1,606 US ASNs against 1,591, 148 French against 93 and 276 German against 183. Blocks follow networks, so spread matters more than raw address count.
Faster in every country
364 ms against 752 ms in the United States and 324 ms against 723 ms in Canada, with Shifter ahead in all five markets.
Frequently asked FAQ questions
Common questions about how we benchmarked Oxylabs.
Send concurrent requests through both gateways to an IP echo endpoint, opening a new connection each time so the gateway rotates, and count the distinct addresses. Keep the request count, machine and time window identical for both. You should land within a few percent of our figures.
Run it against your own targets
Our figures are a starting point, not a verdict. Test both networks on the sites you actually scrape, in the countries you actually need, and pick the one that wins for your traffic.