Both Smartproxy and Oxylabs have released significant product updates in Q1 2026, making this a critical window for businesses evaluating or reconsidering their proxy stack.
Smartproxy has expanded its residential proxy pool to 65 million IPs following a new ISP partnership program, introducing city-level targeting that was previously unavailable at its price tier.
The platform launched a no-code scraping API called Scraping Browser, which handles JavaScript-heavy sites without requiring any custom code setup — a feature that meaningfully lowers the technical barrier for marketing teams, SEO agencies, and data analysts who need scraping capability without engineering resources.
Smartproxy Expands to 65M IPs With No-Code Scraping Browser
Pricing starts at $7 per GB for residential proxies, maintaining Smartproxy’s position as one of the most affordable full-featured providers in the market for small-to-medium operations.
For teams running price monitoring, rank tracking, e-commerce data extraction, and market research at moderate scale, Smartproxy’s Q1 2026 updates make it more competitive than at any previous point.
Oxylabs AI-Powered Web Unblocker Cuts Block Rates by 43%
Oxylabs’ Q1 2026 update centers on its new AI-powered Web Unblocker tool, which handles anti-bot systems — including Cloudflare, Akamai, and Kasada — automatically without manual configuration. Independent benchmarks confirm the tool reduces block rates by a reported 43% compared to 2025 performance on the same targets.
Oxylabs also updated its residential proxy rotation system with real-time ML-driven IP selection, improving the accuracy of IP matching to target ASN expectations. Pricing remains premium at $15 per GB for residential, but enterprise agreements are available.
The effective cost-per-successful-request calculus at enterprise scale often makes Oxylabs competitive with cheaper providers once you factor in the reduced retry bandwidth from higher success rates.
For teams running continuous, large-scale scraping operations against protected targets — e-commerce giants, social platforms, SERP data collection — Oxylabs’ Q1 2026 updates reinforce its position as the enterprise default.
Proxy professionals are actively benchmarking both updates on Reddit’s webscraping community this week.
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