Azure Load Balancer SKUs

Important

On September 30, 2025, Basic Load Balancer will be retired. For more information, see the official announcement. If you are currently using Basic Load Balancer, make sure to upgrade to Standard Load Balancer prior to the retirement date. For guidance on upgrading, visit Upgrading from Basic Load Balancer - Guidance.

Azure Load Balancer has three SKUs.

SKU comparison

Azure Load Balancer has 3 SKUs - Basic, Standard, and Gateway. Each SKU is catered towards a specific scenario and has differences in scale, features, and pricing.

To compare and understand the differences between Basic and Standard SKU, see the following table.

Standard Load Balancer Basic Load Balancer
Scenario Equipped for load-balancing network layer traffic when high performance and ultra-low latency is needed. Routes traffic within and across regions, and to availability zones for high resiliency. Equipped for small-scale applications that don't need high availability or redundancy. Not compatible with availability zones.
Backend type IP based, NIC based NIC based
Protocol TCP, UDP TCP, UDP
Backend pool endpoints Any virtual machines or virtual machine scale sets in a single virtual network Virtual machines in a single availability set or virtual machine scale set
Health probes TCP, HTTP, HTTPS TCP, HTTP
Health probe down behavior TCP connections stay alive on an instance probe down and on all probes down. TCP connections stay alive on an instance probe down. All TCP connections end when all probes are down.
Availability Zones Zone-redundant and zonal frontends for inbound and outbound traffic Not available
Diagnostics Azure Monitor multi-dimensional metrics Not supported
HA Ports Available for Internal Load Balancer Not available
Secure by default Closed to inbound flows unless allowed by a network security group. Internal traffic from the virtual network to the internal load balancer is allowed. Open by default. Network security group optional.
Outbound Rules Declarative outbound NAT configuration Not available
TCP Reset on Idle Available on any rule Not available
Multiple front ends Inbound and outbound Inbound only
Management Operations Most operations < 30 seconds 60-90+ seconds typical
SLA 99.99% Not available
Global VNet Peering Support Standard Internal Load Balancer is supported via Global VNet Peering Not supported
NAT Gateway Support Both Standard Internal Load Balancer and Standard Public Load Balancer are supported via Nat Gateway Not supported
Private Link Support Standard Internal Load Balancer is supported via Private Link Not supported
Global tier Standard Load Balancer supports the Global tier for Public Load Balancers enabling cross-region load balancing Not supported

For more information, see Load balancer limits. For Standard Load Balancer details, see overview, pricing, and SLA. For information on Gateway SKU - catered for third-party network virtual appliances (NVAs), see Gateway Load Balancer overview

Limitations

Next steps