IT-Ops Field Notes

Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which Self-Hosted DNS Ad Blocker to Choose

Published

Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home do the same core job — block ads and trackers network-wide by filtering DNS before it reaches your devices — and both are free, self-hosted, and run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi or a small mini PC. The decision isn’t “which blocks more ads” (loaded with the same blocklists, they block essentially the same things); it’s about architecture, encrypted DNS, and how much you want to configure.

Search intent

Someone searching this has probably already decided to self-host DNS-level ad blocking and wants to know which of these two specific tools to pick — not a general explainer of what DNS ad blocking is.

Quick answer

  • Pick AdGuard Home if you want one binary, a modern UI, and native encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT/DoQ) without bolting on extra services.
  • Pick Pi-hole if you want the larger community/blocklist ecosystem, deeper Docker tooling, or you’re pairing it with Unbound for a fully self-hosted recursive resolver.
  • Both block the same ads at the DNS level — neither can stop in-feed ads on YouTube or Twitch, since those are served from the same domain as the video itself.

Architecture: one binary vs. a stack

AdGuard Home is a single Go binary that bundles the DNS server, DHCP server, and web UI together. Pi-hole is a stack of separate, well-worn components — dnsmasq (or, in Pi-hole v6, its own FTL DNS engine) for DNS, lighttpd for the web server, and PHP/SQLite for the admin interface and query logging.

Practically: AdGuard Home is simpler to reason about and has a lower resource footprint out of the box. Pi-hole’s stack is older and more modular, which is why it has deeper third-party tooling (Docker images, Unbound integration guides, Gravity sync tools) built up around it over the years.

Encrypted DNS is the real differentiator

This is the specific feature gap worth knowing before you choose: AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, and DNS-over-QUIC natively — both as an upstream (encrypting your outbound queries to a public resolver) and, with a certificate, as a listener (encrypting queries from your own devices to it). Pi-hole does not support any of these natively out of the box — getting encrypted DNS with Pi-hole means adding a separate tool (commonly cloudflared or Unbound with DoT upstream) alongside it.

If encrypted DNS matters to you and you don’t want a second container to maintain, that alone is a reason to pick AdGuard Home.

Docker install (both, side by side)

# AdGuard Home
services:
  adguardhome:
    image: adguard/adguardhome
    container_name: adguardhome
    volumes:
      - ./adguard-work:/opt/adguardhome/work
      - ./adguard-conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "3000:3000/tcp"  # first-run setup wizard
    restart: unless-stopped

# Pi-hole
services:
  pihole:
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    container_name: pihole
    environment:
      TZ: "Etc/UTC"
      FTLCONF_webserver_api_password: "changeme"
    volumes:
      - ./pihole-etc:/etc/pihole
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"
    restart: unless-stopped

Both need port 53 free on the host, which conflicts with systemd-resolved on many Linux distros — disable or reconfigure that first, or you’ll get a port-bind error on first launch.

What you give up either way

DNS-level blocking only filters what resolves through it. Any device hardcoded to a public DNS (8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1) or using DNS-over-HTTPS in an app that ignores your network’s DNS settings (some browsers, some phone apps) bypasses the block entirely. For a small office, pair whichever tool you pick with a firewall rule that blocks outbound port 53/853 to anything except your resolver — see our pfSense vs OPNsense guide if you don’t already have a firewall capable of that rule.

Hardware to run it on

Either tool is light enough to run alongside other services on the same box — this doesn’t need dedicated hardware. If you’re setting up a homelab server from scratch, our best mini PC for a homelab guide covers budget options that comfortably run DNS filtering plus several other containers on one N100 box.

Bottom line

Neither tool blocks more ads than the other with the same blocklists — pick based on encrypted DNS (AdGuard Home wins natively) versus ecosystem and modularity (Pi-hole wins). If you’re not sure, AdGuard Home is the lower-maintenance default for a new setup in 2026.