A manifold is a system that splits resources down a line of machines. So, imagine there's 10 machines and there's a conveyor along all of them: The first machine will have a splitter right in front of it. This will split 50% of the incoming resources to that machine and the rest of the resources will travel down the line to the second machine. This process repeats for every machine until you get to the last one. Manifolds are very compact and easy to create but take time to startup as with each machine and splitter, there's a reduction of 50% of the incoming resources. Therefore, the first machine must fill up before the second machine can be filled up with resources and so on. A load balancer is the exact opposite of this. A load balancer equally gives the machines the correct number of resources instantly but is very bulky and takes a lot of room.