Rate Limiting vs Throttling: What’s the Difference?

When you're building an API, controlling traffic is essential.

Without proper traffic controls, a sudden spike in requests can overwhelm your application, increase infrastructure costs, slow down legitimate users, or even cause an outage.

Two terms you'll often hear in this context are rate limiting and throttling.

They're closely related, and many developers use the terms interchangeably. But they aren't exactly the same.