Oxylabs Alternatives for YouTube Downloads: APIs and Proxies Compared (2026)

Teams use Oxylabs for YouTube in one of two ways. Either they rent its residential proxies and run yt-dlp through them, or they call its YouTube Downloader, part of Oxylabs' Web Scraper API. Both work. Both also leave a fair amount of the job with you: proxies to manage in the first case, and a cloud storage bucket, async jobs and per-GB billing in the second.

Short version: if you want a YouTube URL in and a link to an MP4 or MP3 out, a dedicated download API like Vid Kraken is the simplest swap. There are no buckets to set up, the file comes from our CDN, failed downloads are free, and bandwidth costs $0.15–0.25 per GB against Oxylabs' $1.60–2.00. Stay with Oxylabs if you need 8K, a batch endpoint, files written straight into your own bucket, or Oxylabs' other scraping products under one contract.

How Oxylabs' YouTube Downloader works

The YouTube Downloader is the youtube_download source in Oxylabs' Web Scraper API. From Oxylabs' documentation, as of November 2026:

• Input is a video ID, not a URL. You send one ID, or many through the batch endpoint.
• Output goes to your cloud storage. Downloads are only available as async jobs that upload the file to your Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Alibaba OSS or other S3-compatible bucket. You set up the bucket and give Oxylabs write access.
• Files are MP4 for video and M4A for audio. There's no MP3 option.
• Quality from 144p to 8K, defaulting to 720p. You can also trim a clip (start_at, end_at) and pick the original audio track.
• Error codes. Failed jobs return codes such as VIDEO_GEO_RESTRICTED or VIDEO_AGE_RESTRICTED.
• Limits: videos up to 12 hours long, and one hour of download time per job.

curl --user "USERNAME:PASSWORD" https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "source": "youtube_download",
    "query": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "context": [
      {"key": "download_type", "value": "video"},
      {"key": "video_quality", "value": "1080"}
    ],
    "storage_type": "s3",
    "storage_url": "s3://your-bucket/youtube/"
  }'

Pricing is per GB on prepaid monthly plans: $2.00/GB on the $30 and $100 plans, $1.60/GB on the $500 plan, and lower rates on enterprise plans from $2,500 a month. New accounts get $5 of free credit. The pricing page doesn't say whether failed jobs are billed. On top of that, you pay your cloud provider to store the files and for egress when your users download them.

The alternatives

Vid Kraken

One request with a YouTube URL and a format. You get back a link to the finished file on our CDN, so there's no bucket to configure and nothing to serve yourself.

curl -X POST https://vidkraken.com/api/v2/download \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIDKRAKEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ", "format": "1080"}'

• Formats: 1080, 720, 480 and 360 as MP4, audio-mp3 at 320 kbps, and audio for the original stream. 4K on request.
• Clips: startTime and endTime in seconds.
• Async when you want it: poll GET /download/{jobId} or pass a webhookUrl.
• Typed errors: a fixed list of error codes such as AGE_RESTRICTED and GEO_RESTRICTED.
• Reliability: 99.99% of downloads complete, with the numbers published live.

Bot detection, proxies and YouTube's changes are handled on our side. You pay for bandwidth only, at the delivered file size with a 20 MB minimum. Failed downloads, polling, webhooks and metadata lookups are free.

Bright Data

Bright Data's YouTube Scraper API is built for data, not files: titles, views, likes, descriptions, transcripts and channel details, billed per record. For actual video files, Bright Data sells a separate video data product aimed at AI training pipelines, delivered to your S3, GCS or Azure storage and priced through sales. It's a good fit if you need millions of records or a training dataset under contract. It's more than you need for a "download this video" button.

Apify

Apify's Store has dozens of YouTube downloader Actors, each from an independent developer with its own input, output and price. They're quick to try, but reliability varies a lot from one Actor to the next. We compared them in detail, with 30-day run stats, in Vid Kraken vs Apify.

Running yt-dlp on residential proxies

If you used Oxylabs only for its proxies, you can keep doing what you do with any residential provider, Oxylabs and Bright Data included. Our yt-dlp proxy guide covers the setup and the sticky sessions you need to avoid 403s. You still own the rest: updates, retries, storage, and the bot checks that come and go.

What 100 GB costs

Take 1,000 ten-minute videos at 1080p, roughly 100 GB of files. Prices as listed in November 2026:

At larger volumes the gap holds: Vid Kraken's Growth plan is $399 for 2 TB ($0.20/GB) and Scale is $1,499 for 10 TB ($0.15/GB). See pricing.

Switching from Oxylabs

Most of the request maps one to one:

If you still want the files in your own bucket, fetch downloadUrl and upload it. That's one streaming copy, and you only do it for the files you keep.

What you give up

• Resolution above 1080p is on request, up to 4K. Oxylabs goes to 8K self-serve.
• No batch endpoint. You send one request per video, with up to 100 running at once.
• YouTube only. Oxylabs and Bright Data also sell SERP, e-commerce and general scraping. If you buy those anyway, one contract may matter more than the per-GB price.

Frequently asked questions