Pihole vs AdGuard Home

I've been using a pihole exclusively for years on my Ubiquiti network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it's a stable, easy ad-blocking solution. I've never even considered moving from it, seeing how well pihole Just Works.

The only edge Adguard Home has over PiHole I can think of is its out-of-box support of encrypted DNS upstream and downstream queries (e.g. DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS).

I've used both, each for a long stretch of time; they are fundamentally extremely similar and you'll be fine with either. I switched to AdGuard Home entirely because I could run it directly from my OPNSense router instead of a second machine. There isn't really anything else major I've noticed different between them, but my usage is fairly basic. AdGuard's interface felt a bit more mature and clean, but that's it.

If you're happy with your PiHole, there's no reason I'm aware of to switch.

So, anecdotally, I used pihole first more than 5 years ago and switched to AdGuard as pihole did not have the ability to do conditional forwarding of requests for various zones or the ability to add static records via the UI. Conditional forwarding means that I can send the requests for let’s say example.com to an internal server hosting that zone responding with private records for internal services as well as other similar scenarios.

I also like that I can identify clients or networks in adguard by various factors and apply different rules (blocking and forwarding) and collect statistics on those clients or groups of clients, I don’t think pihole has either feature yet.

I also like that adguard is a static binary which is likely what people mean when they say it’s easier to install and maintain.

As to why I keep it and don’t switch back, I like the interface AdGuard has and it doesn’t break so I often forget about it anymore. I’ll update if I remember anything else but those are the larger things for me. If pihole is working then stick with it but curiosity is a definite reason to try adguard, I bet you could just stop pihole on your machine and run adguard to check it out without too much work (yay static binary) but I haven’t tested that myself.

Hope that helps!

As someone who has tried both and went back to pihole for no reason other than "why not?" -- it works as intended, does everything accordingly and I have 0 issues running it plus 2x unbound dns servers.

There's a third party tool for AdGuard which allows syncing multiple instances. Very nice because if you want something to be redundant in your home setup, it's DNS. This adds the ability to sync configured rulesets and custom DNS entries.

EDIT: There seems to be a similar tool for Pi-hole as well.

You can't really go wrong with any of those. They are both very solid options. Having said that, if I had to recommend one, I'd go with Adguard, because:

• The interface is better. Most notably the query log interface. Searching the logs with some long time span makes Pihole spike in memory usage and is super slow. (there's no server-side pagination)
• Custom filters are more powerful thanks to modifiers, which AFAIK Pihole does not support. Some of it can be configured via dnsmasq (without user friendly interface), some I had not found any solution for. Good example is dnstype modifier, which I sometimes use to block AAAA responses for sites, that have set AAAA records, but the service actually does not work over IPv6. So I can disable IPv6 for certain domains if I need to. (or other way around, force IPv6 only)

Some of the above might have changed, I haven't used Pihole for about a year.

Been running a pi-hole with unbound for years here. Apart from updating the roots file every six months its been sitting there doing it's thing happily without skipping a beat. I did take a small look at Adguard but couldn't see anything like the tail pihole log option which I tend to have in a tab as I like to see what's going on.

As someone who switched from PiHole to AdGuard Home a couple of years ago, my reason was because PiHole dropped support for adblock style lists that I was using, while AdGuard still supports them.

See here for more into

I don't think you'll miss anything. If pihole works for you, then there is no need to switch to adguard.

One thing I found helpful is configuring my router (asuswrt-merlin) to transparently route all dns request to my adguard instance. You might already heard that some apps and IoT devices tried to be clever and hard-coded their dns server so they can evade dns blocking (I'm looking at you Netflix). If your router support redirecting all dns request to a custom dns server, definitely use it!

I used to do all this, but then I gave up and started paying for NextDNS. It's like having your own Piholes in the cloud. It's like £18/year and is way more reliable than self hosting, especially for something as crucial as DNS for your home. It also has excellent parental controls if you need that, multiple profiles, good logging and analytics and a decent looking privacy policy.

Sure, it's not as fun as self-hosting but it's better then getting shouted at every time someone's app stops working because of some glitch in your setup.

I have run my own PiHole previously. Then I wanted Ad blocking on my phone, so I also setup OpenVPN that ran alongside my PiHole so I could get ad blocking anywhere. I travel often, and then we moved, so I never got it set up again, at the same time I discovered AdGuard could be configured on both home networks for network-level blocking, but they also have device profiles for iOS.

I haven’t had to fuss with PiHole now in years.

If you are happy to do the administration of a PiHole, and the scope it provides, it’s good. I didn’t want to have to fuss with it anymore.

FWIW I tried AdGuard as I liked the look of some of its features but it slowed my connection down massively - sites would take ages to load.

I may have done something wrong but I tried quite a few things but went back to PiHole as I’ve never had any issues with it.

YMMV

AdGurd has a Home Assistant add-on

I found it easier to setup adguard as my DHCP server, because I wasn't able to change the default DNS settings of my isp's router.

Additionally The web interface was quite laggy on my raspberry pi 1b and it always filled up my sdcard with log data (it's been over a year since when I last used pihole though)

Does AdGuard Home have proper IPv6 support meanwhile? I remember the lack thereof made me switch back to pi-hole a few years ago.

I used both and Adguard looks more buggy for me. And also it is heavier.

I only use PiHole for a couple of months, it wasn't easy to setup something that worked on my LAN and over internet. Initially I used OpenVPN but was hard to use it with profiles to identify the devices.

Than a tried AdGuard Home, and use it with DoH/DoT server was very simple, and can easily use any profile for each device on LAN or DoH/DoT server.
Can easily search logs and block/allow for each device.

Give it a try, and use it for a couple days.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

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I hosted both, adguard on VPS for whenever i'm outside and pihole in my local network with my adguard's DoQ as upstream. I also use wireguard so i don't need to switch DNS and to bypass DPI on my phone.