Azure Load Balancer vs Application Gateway vs Traffic Manager

Last updated on March 20, 2023

	Load Balancer	Application Gateway	Traffic Manager	Front Door
Service	Network load balancer.	Web traffic load balancer.	DNS-based traffic load balancer.	Global application delivery
Network Protocols	Layer 4 (TCP or UDP)	Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS)	Layer 7 (DNS)	Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS)
Type	Internal and Public	Standard and WAF	–	Standard and Premium
Routing	Hash-based, Source IP affinity	Path-based	Performance, Weighted, Priority, Geographic, MultiValue, Subnet	Latency, Priority, Weighted, Session Affinity
Global/Regional Service	Global	Regional	Global	Global
Recommended Traffic	Non-HTTP(S)	HTTP(S)	Non-HTTP(S)	HTTP(S)
Endpoints	NIC (VM/VMSS), IP address	IP address/FQDN, Virtual machine/VMSS, App services	Cloud service, App service/slot, Public IP address	App service, Cloud service, Storage, Application Gateway, API Management, Public IP address, Traffic Manager, Custom Host
Endpoint Monitoring	Health probes	Health probes	HTTP/HTTPS GET requests	Health probes
Redundancy	Zone redundant and Zonal	Zone redundant	Resilient to regional failures	Resilient to regional failures
SSL/TLS Termination	–	Supported	–	Supported
Web Application Firewall	–	Supported	–	Supported
Sticky Sessions	Supported	Supported	–	Supported
VNet Peering	Supported	Supported	–	–
SKU	Basic and Standard	Standard and WAF (v1 & v2)	–	Standard and Premium
Pricing	Standard Load Balancer – charged based on the number of rules and processed data.	Charged based on Application Gateway type, processed data, outbound data transfers, and SKU.	Charged per DNS queries, health checks, measurements, and processed data points.	Charged based on outbound/inbound data transfers, and incoming requests from client to Front Door POPs.

Azure Load Balancer vs Application Gateway vs Traffic Manager vs Front Door Resources:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/overview
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/traffic-manager/traffic-manager-overview

Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.