ComparisonsAugust 22, 2026·6 min read
Gateway vs Load Balancer: When to Use Which
Load balancers spread traffic for reliability; gateways control traffic for correctness. A decision guide with EdgeBalancer examples.
The difference in one line
- Load balancer: "Which origin gets this request?" (reliability — 7 strategies, health checks)
- Gateway: "Should this request be allowed, where should it go, and what should change?" (control — 9 features, one Worker)
Decision table
| Need | Use |
| Spread across equal backends | LB round-robin |
| Premium vs free tier | LB weighted or gateway path routing |
| Auth at the edge | Gateway JWT |
| A/B rollout | Gateway canary |
| Block abusive IPs | Gateway IP rules |
| Mock a not-yet-built API | Gateway mock routes |
Cost
Both run as Workers in your Cloudflare account — under 100k req/day $0. Same deploy/version/rollback, same hostname checks.
#gateway#load balancer#comparison#architecture
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