Edgegap and Hathora both offer container-based, dedicated game server hosting orchestration.
What sets them apart?
Edgegap
Edgegap offers a modern, highly optimized, multicloud game server orchestration on the world’s largest edge network, which enables multiplayer game developers to:
Ensure consistent end user experience with instant, regionless access to all of Edgegap’s 615 locations worldwide (and counting) on-demand;
Deliver low latency online experience for its players with a 58% average reduction vs. public cloud;
Rapid scaling with a confirmed, consistent 40 deployments per second for 60 minutes reaching 14 million concurrent users (“CCU”) in that time span, with more possible over time;
High resiliency with the ability to instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers (cloud and bare metal) with guaranteed 99.99% uptime.
Edgegap’s platform is accessible to anyone and can be tested with a free account which includes the essential resources to help game developers get started.
Edgegap’s approach enables game studios to deploy to all its cloud locations worldwide at a single, universal price based on 100% compute usage.
Edgegap also offers an easy-to-integrate, fully managed matchmaking system, and the option to use hybrid orchestration which optimizes bare metal and cloud usage to further minimize costs for game studios.
Edgegap prides itself on its easy and short integration process (“get your game online in minutes”) including its compatibility through easy-to-use plugins, samples, and integrations with major game engines (Unity, Unreal) and tools most used by game developers (e.g., Heroic Labs Nakama, Mirror Networking, PlayFab, Photon Fusion, etc.; often endorsed by the original creators themselves), for an even easier integration process.
Edgegap is constantly updated, with releases every two weeks on average including new features, platform improvements and bug fixes.
Hathora
Unlike Edgegap, Hathora does not offer a public-facing platform. It requires developers to contact Hathora's sales team and imposes on game developers to contractually hire Hathora's engineers for its paid tiers.
Hathora’s orchestration leverages a network that includes bare metal and cloud providers. They list 14 regions worldwide, with a heavy emphasis on the United States where 5 of their 14 locations (35%) are located.
Hathora’s scalability is not backed by any publicly available data.
Hathora’s latency-reduction claims are not backed by any publicly available data.
Hathora does not share its availability claims but does have a public status page.
Hathora has a plugin for integration in Unity, and guides for integration in Unreal and Photon.
Hathora has monthly “changelogs” which highlight its platform’s improvements since April 2023.
Hathora does not share publicly its usage-based pricing, nor the pricing of any of its features.
Initial Setup & Integration
Edgegap’s documentation and videos highlight the orchestration platform’s simple integration process and demonstrate how fast it can be achieved.
Edgegap provides integration process for both Unity Engine and Unreal Engine. Specifically for Unity, it offers a plugin which enables developers to containerize and deploy a game server directly from Unity’s editor. Edgegap’s “build from container” integration process for Unreal Engine is faster than any other method, as it doesn’t require developers to build Unreal Engine from Source which is the typical dedicated game server integration process for this engine. Both help developers containerize their game server for their project, and deploy it to Edgegap’s platform in minutes.
Additionally, Edgegap provides samples alongside dedicated integration processes across major netcode transport including Mirror Networking, Unity’s Netcode for Game Objects (NGO), Photon Fusion, Fish-Networking (“FishNet”). This also includes major game services and backend tools such as Heroic Labs’ Nakama, Microsoft’s PlayFab, Epic Games’ Epic Online Services, Pragma Engine, and Beamable.
Edgegap provides game developers with the flexibility to choose which container registry they want to use – including Edgegap’s own container registry, but also external solutions if developers prefer, such as Docker Hub, GitLab, Google Cloud’s Registry, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
Once a game server is deployed, Edgegap offers a highly intuitive user experience. Every user can quickly oversee its deployment on its dashboard. For more insights, Edgegap offers an Analytics dashboard which provides details on monitoring releases with live server count per version and resource usage overview, including CPU-related and memory insights, alongside networking insights to detect inefficient networking patterns and optimize netcode performance.
Hathora’s platform functions through a room-based deployment mechanism. After containerizing a game server (“process”), tied to a specific build, Hathora deploys a room which is a “1:1 with processes”.
While Hathora’s room system can appear effective on paper, offering, for example, game studios to launch multiple matches in a single room; the room system’s logic is not available out-of-the-box with Hathora and must be developed by the game studio.
In terms of setting up their game server, developers begin their Hathora journey with the same step as Edgegap: a game server upload through a container. Then, the server deployments must be configured manually, instead of automatically. Finally, once the setup is complete, the game client must call deployment in the room request to activate the game’s room on Hathora’s network.
To help with integration, Hathora has a single Unity engine integration whose last update is listed as March 2025. It also has a Photon sample. Hathora does not provide samples for Mirror Networking, Fish-Networking and Unity for Game Objects.
Hathora’s onboarding guide to Unreal states Hathora still requires building Unreal Engine for Source, a process known for taking hours (where even community guides are available to provide tips on making it a shorter process) and is know to often fail during the process.
Hathora has guides for integration with backend solutions. This includes Pragma.gg, which is also backed by the same Venture Company as Hathora – Upfront Ventures. Additionally, it has guides for EOS, Nakama, and Beamable.
Products
Beyond dedicated game servers, Edgegap offers a range of solutions to help multiplayer game developers, including:
Matchmaking: Group players easily and launch games instantly. A fully managed, infinitely customizable matchmaking system to optimally group players worldwide.
Managed Clusters: Managed Clusters make hosting self-managed game services and game backend easy and fast.
Managed Infrastructure: Easily and cost-effectively run all backend services in Edgegap’s fully managed clusters including, managed Kubernetes, managed databases & storage, and real-time CDN.
Container Registry: Edgegap’s registry includes 10 GB, with external registry integration available.
Analytics: Generate insights to optimize your game server, usage and orchestration experience.
Private, Always Online Deployments: Learn how to enable persistent worlds with 24/7 always online deployments. Ideal for multiplayer experiences such as social games and MMOs.
China Deployments: Leverage the same platform worldwide. Availability is pending regulatory, country-specific compliance in this market.
Hybrid Orchestration (Bare Metal + Cloud): For committed studios with predictable traffic, leverage Bare Metal for low tide traffic to optimize costs, and seamlessly scale with Cloud for traffic spikes.
Hathora’s primary service for its platform is its game server orchestration. Additionally, it offers:
UBA: A build development tool.
Fleets: Scale game servers across regions. This requires Hathora’s “Pro” paid tier.
Analytics: In-depth telemetry. This requires Hathora’s “Enterprise” paid tier.
Hathora does not have a matchmaking system even though it is a “critical component of the matchflow that ensures players are paired into games in a fair, efficient, and scalable way” and listed as part of its match flows architecture, as of writing in August 2025. Thus, it requires game studios to purchase and integrate a matchmaking system.
Performance (Distribution, Latency Reduction, Scalability & Resilience)
Distribution
Edgegap’s modern, regionless orchestration platform is built from the ground up to provide a multi-tenant environment. Each studio can manage multiple productions within a single, geographically distributed, and highly available environment.
Edgegap prides itself on leveraging its patented orchestrator on the world’s first, and largest, edge network built for multiplayer game server hosting. It includes, as of writing, 615 locations worldwide across 17+ cloud and bare metal providers who are all available to deploy game servers on-demand.
Edgegap's platform instantly distributes multiplayer games worldwide without the need for selecting regions like in traditional orchestration platforms.
Hathora, as of August 2025, lists 14 regions worldwide across cloud and bare metal providers. It is heavily US-centric, with five of its fourteen locations based in the USA (i.e. 35% of overall distribution is in the USA).
Hathora distributes game servers to all its regions and “will allocate it to an existing process if it has capacity” in its network, which could indicate limited server capacity, or “noisy neighbour” impacting its scalability.
Latency
Edgegap’s platform, using its patented decision-making algorithm and the world’s largest edge network, to deploy game servers closest to users. Which enables game developers to deliver:
Reduces players’ latency by “58% on average vs. public cloud”;
Ensure “78% sub-50 milliseconds (i.e., "real time") latency vs. 14% for public cloud,” alongside “91% sub-100 ms latency (i.e. “sweep spot” for non-eSports multiplayer) vs. 67% for public cloud.”
Critically, this ensures a “95% improvement of players' experience” worldwide, which helps game developers ensure a certain consistent end user experience including traditionally challenging markets such as Oceania and Asia which doesn’t always justify hosting in these markets with traditional orchestration given certain countries’ lower average revenue per user or small population size.
Additionally, it helps game developers avoid static, region-locked matchmaking which helps increase match quality for players.
Hathora has 14 locations worldwide. It claims to help reduce latency through “optimal server placement near players” and “traffic routing through a private backbone”. It is documentation, as of August 2025, claims to use a “premium edge network” to reduce latency despite using major public cloud and bare metal. Hathora offers no data on its latency-reduction claims, nor does Hathora share case studies with clients or real world information to support these claims.
As for the overall number of regions, this may prove too few locations to meaningfully impact latency. Regrouping cities far away geographically likely leading to poor latency for locations farther away from the database.
As stated in this article, Edgegap’s collaboration with a AAA publisher showed that, despite having the AAA studio’s large number of locations (more than what even most studios would be able to afford), by using traffic from 600,000 transactions and comparing the results with a AAA studio’s current architecture, only Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 milliseconds to a drastic 48 milliseconds.
Scalability
Edgegap’s performance benchmark proves its orchestration can consistently scale at 40 deployments per second, sustained for 60 minutes, for a total of 14 million concurrent users (“CCU”) of players worldwide. Thanks to its patented decision-making and rapid-scaling technology. Stacking two of such instances on Edgegap’s platforms allow game developers to manage as much traffic as Fortnite had during their peak launch (100 req. per seconds).
This allows game developers using Edgegap’s orchestration to scale and ensure to succeed the biggest scaling challenge of orchestrators; namely meeting player’s demand over a short period of time such as a midnight launch, a game’s addition to a subscription service, or a “streaming sensation” overnight popularity.
Hathora does not share any data about its scaling abilities to prove its “lighting fast” capability.
In an in-depth interview in 80 Levels, the co-founder and COO of Mountaintop Studios (Matt Hansen) whose studio developed the game Spectre Divide, one of Hathora’s highest profile game at the time, stated:
“Technical issues in the first few hours of the launch, caused by server scalability issues, meant people struggled to get into the game. Hansen believes that the initial group of people never returned once things stabilized.
“That fucking killed us,” Hansen recalled. “It killed our early momentum, which is critical for any new game.”
While short lived, Hathora’s server scaling issues at launch, one of multiplayer’s most critical part of its lifecycle, had such an impact the studio’s co-founder said it “killed” the game’s momentum. Spectre Divide, alongside the studio Mountaintop, closed in Match 2025 as it was unable to recover from its failed launch.
Resilience
Edgegap’s vast network telemetry allows it to detect issues with sites or providers, such as outages, and instantly redirect deployments across its 17+ providers across cloud and bare metal.
Edgegap’s platform has been running live 24/7 for the past six years, maintaining over 99.99% availability.
Hathora does not make claims about its availability or resilience on its main website. Hathora does have a public-facing status page.
Platforms & Adoption
Edgegap’s dedicated game server and various integration ensure the platform supports all game hardware types, such as PC, consoles (PlayStation, XBOX, Nintendo Switch), VR, mobile, web-based (HTML5, WebGL, etc.) alongside new devices such as extended reality (“XR”) devices including Apple’s Vision headsets, and META’s AI glasses such as Ray-Ban Meta and Meta Ray-Ban Display.
Edgegap is part of Nintendo’s Switch developer portal alongside PlayStation’s Partner Program.
Edgegap is the sole orchestrator endorsed by Epic Games, makers of Unreal Engine, through its Epic Online Services.
In terms of games, Edgegap currently manages live games from AAA titles to indie projects alike. Current AAA games running on Edgegap includes (as of 2025.09) PAYDAY 3 by Starbreeze, 7 Days: Blood Moon by The Fun Pimps and Den of Thieves by Otherwise Entertainment, alongside top 5 VR game Ghosts of Tabor and Digigods. Case studies for certain of these games are available to read.
Over 1,600 studios have used Edgegap’s platform (as of 2025.09), and managed millions of players and hundreds of thousands of game server.
Hathora works with game studios primarily developing console and PC games. Its highest-profile clients include 1040 Games’ Splitgate 2 which was unlaunched a month after its initial release and cut staff, Mountaintop Studios’ Spectre Divide which closed both the studio and game after six months from its launch, alongside Frost Giant Studios Stormgate which may shut down in 2025.
Development
Edgegap, based in the region of Montréal, Canada, promotes its high-quality development and operations. Namely its product, development, and operations teams employ robust processes, including roadmap strategy, agile methodology, QA, and strict code reviews. It’s CI/CD pipeline spans development, staging, and production environments, resulting in a high-quality platform strong availability. The orchestrator's production is entirely in-house from Edgegap’s office in the region of Montréal by a strong and cohesive team.
Edgegap consistently releases updates through sprints, maintaining a cadence of a release every two weeks on average, introducing new features, improvements and bug fixes each time. All listed in its release notes.
Hathora was founded in 2020. It does not provide insights into its development process. On its blog, Hathora shares monthly “changelogs” (i.e., release notes) about its platform since April 2023.
Security & Support
Security
Edgegap advertises its automated protection against hackers with instant DDoS attack protection.
Whenever Edgegap detects abnormal traffic patterns indicative of DDoS attacks in real time, the platform automatically redirects traffic away from the targeted server, disperse the malicious traffic, and even scale up resources if needed.
Hathora promotes its ability to “defends against DDoS attacks”. It’s DDoS protection feature is locked behind its highest cost pricing tier (“Enterprise”).
Support
Edgegap’s client support is free and includes 24/7 on-call engineers for games with live traffic. It has a client support dashboard.
For integration support, or ongoing conversations with clients, Edgegap has a public Discord server, or supports clients via Slack or the ability to contact its team via email.
Edgegap also provides SLA on a case-by-case basis.
Hathora’s paid client have access to “24/7 access to our on-call” support. Hathora’s “Pro” clients are limited to business hours support and “Enterprise” clients are the only ones with 24/7 priority support. Hathora promotes the ability to receive support via phone, email, and Slack.
Edgegap provides access to its platform with a free account. This includes a free trial with the essential resources to help game developers get started. It doesn’t require a credit card.
Edgegap has a clear, transparent pricing for its game server orchestration that is solely based on usage. Namely, $0.00115/min. per Dedicated vCPU (which is fractionable) and $0.10/GB of monthly Network Egress as of 2025. Edgegap’s pricing is 100% for compute unlike traditional orchestration which has wasted capacity.
Edgegap allows for vCPU fractioning, down to ¼ vCPU. This means for game developers they can optimize their game server to, for example, 1/4 vCPU that means a final price of 25% * $0.00115 = $0.0002875/min.
Edgegap does not require a commitment, nor has upfront costs, nor does it require engineering support.
Edgegap offers hybrid orchestration (bare metal + cloud), which is available only via clients request as 2025 due to required information necessary to propose a final pricing.
For matchmaking, Edgegap has managed cluster tiers with clear “per-hour” pricing. Starting as low as $22 per month.
Hathora has 3 tiers of pricing:
“Explore” is their free tier to help developers “integrate and evaluate”.
Hathora’s “Pro” tier is for game studios when they are in “develop & playtest” mode. It removes the free-tier limitations. Hathora’s “Pro” tier usage-based pricing is not communicated publicly (“Contact us for rates” is stated on their website). It unlocks access to its fleet manager, and business-hours support.
Hathora’s “Enterprise” tier is for game studios ready to scale their game for launch. In addition to the pro-tier features, it adds “Bare Metal reservations”, DDoS protection and 24/7 support. Hathora’s “Enterprise” tier usage-based pricing is not communicated publicly (“Contact us for rates” is stated on their website).
Hathora does not publicly share information on the pricing model for its UBA tool.
Hathora requires clients to sign a contract to access its platform. As part of the contractual agreement, Hathora requires the client to pay for engineering support.
Switching gaming infrastructure is no minor feat. To ensure a smooth transition that maintains the integrity of gameplay and player experience, certain steps and considerations are vital.
Analyze the Hathora Setup:
Audit Current Implementation: Start by taking stock of the current setup on Hathora. This involves understanding the architecture, assessing any custom configurations, and identifying integrations or plugins in use. Edgegap and Hathora both use game server containers, and you might find the transition easier using the Edgegap Unreal or Unity plugin.
Documentation & Backup: Before initiating the migration, it's crucial to document the existing setup comprehensively and back up all essential data. This provides a safety net in case of unforeseen challenges during the migration.
Integration of Edgegap’s plugin and API:
Initial Integration: Post the preliminary analysis, the next step is to replace the Hathora API with the Edgegap API. This serves as the bridge between the game and Edgegap’s distributed infrastructure.
Custom Configurations: Depending on the complexity of the game and its features, developers might need to implement custom configurations that cater to the unique demands of their game, such as environment variables and port mapping.
Leverage Edgegap's Matchmaker:
Transitioning Lobby or Matchmaking Systems: Edgegap’s built-in matchmaker, optimized for latency and player preferences, can be configured to replace the existing system.
Player Experience: The objective of this step is to ensure that players continue to experience efficient, latency-optimized matching without disruptions during or after the transition.
Testing:
Stress and Load Testing: After the migration process, it's imperative to subject the game to rigorous testing. This includes stress tests to understand how the new infrastructure holds up under heavy loads and comprehensive game testing to identify any hitches or issues.
Feedback Loops: Engaging a set of players for beta testing on the new setup can provide invaluable feedback to make necessary adjustments.
Monitoring & Optimization:
Continuous Monitoring: While Edgegap is always there to monitor the current deployments, game studios can also monitor their servers using Edgegap's tools ensures that the game remains performant and that any anomalies or issues are detected promptly.
Iterative Optimization: Based on performance data and player feedback, iterative optimizations can be made to improve server performance, reduce costs, and enhance the overall player experience.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Edgegap
Hathora
Leverages edge computing through the world's multi-cloud network for optimized latency and performance.
Game server hosting orchestration in limited locations, bring-your-own bare metal & with option for network acceleration.
Distributed edge computing deployments nearest to players to lower latency & improve multiplayer experience.
Centralized cloud-based servers using Bare Metal.
Extensive global reach with over 17+ providers with 615+ locations worldwide.
Access to 14 regions worldwide.
Pay-as-you-go by the minute, paying only for active use and traffic, with precise costs calculations.
Hourly usage-based pricing, pay when players are actively connected.
Plugins for native support within the Unity & Unreal editor, and support for Godot, Cocos. Soon available for Bevy.
Deployable with major game engine supporting containerization.
Up to 14M CCCU with dynamic rapid-scaling of 40 deployments per seconds for 60 minutes sustained.
Hathora does not disclose its scalability information.
Comprehensive documentation, dashboard, and 24/7 support for clients.
Documentation and logging system providing server logs and system metrics.
"One click" plugins for major game engine (Unreal, Unity), alonside seamless SDK/API integration. Video tutorials for major engine, netcodes & more.
Simple multi-step process: upload, configure & monitor server instances.
Optimized, low-latency network due to the world's largest edge computing network built by Edgegap.
Network acceleration based on AWS Global Accelerator.
17+ providers, including public cloud and Bare Metal, for multi-cloud to ensure automatic rerounting of traffic for the ultimate resilience.
Comes with DDoS protection. Uses a cloud and bare metal providers.
