Difference between Reverse Proxy and Load Balancers

Both promises to improve efficiency and sits in between client and server. They nearly looks same when we try to understand them, but still their functionality differs.

Load balancing : Is a hardware or a software unit that distributes the total load on a website by distributing it to multiple servers.
The algorithms used by load balancing should be chosen as such it makes the best use of each servers’s capacity and can provide the result as fast as possible.
Load balancers are of three categories: DNS Round Robin , L3/L4 Load Balancer [ works on IP and TCP layer ] and L7 Load Balancer [ works on application layer.
The different kinds of algorithms used by load balancer for distributing load are IP Hash , Least connection, Round robin , Least traffic etc.

Reverse Proxy: The act as the face of website or we can say they serve as gateway that web traffic has to pass. The main role of reverse proxy is:
1. Security : They act as wall to your backend server. Protecting the backend from direct interactions and thus improving the security of overall system.
2. Web acceleration: It also provides features like caching, SSL encryption and Compression to reduce the time to provide the response to clients.
3. Flexibility : The changes in backend architecture become more flexible as client can only access the reverse proxy.

Reverse proxy can even be relevant even if there is only one server in your system. In such cases there is no requirement of load balancers but still a reverse proxy can benefit by providing security, flexibility and web acceleration.