Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use in 2026?
Between 15–20% of all DNS traffic on a typical home network is ads, trackers, and telemetry software quietly phoning home without your knowledge. This guide compares Pi-hole and AdGuard Home across every dimension that matters so you can choose the right DNS level blocker for your setup.
What is DNS-Level Ad Blocking?
Browser extensions like uBlock Origin are useful, but they only protect one device and can't see traffic from your smart TV, IoT sensors, or mobile apps. DNS-level ad blocking takes a completely different approach.
Every time a device on your network tries to reach a domain whether to load a webpage, fetch an ad, or phone home to a tracking server it first asks a DNS server for that domain's IP address. A DNS ad blocker steps into that role and simply refuses to resolve domains that appear on its blocklists. No address means no connection, which means the ad or tracker never loads at all.
The result: every phone, laptop, smart TV, game console, and connected appliance on your network gets automatic protection without installing a single thing on any of them. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are the two most popular tools for doing exactly this.
Installation & Setup DRAW
Both tools are remarkably easy to get running. If you're using a NAS platform like TrueNAS, both are available directly from the app catalog and install in a few clicks. For everyone else, Docker is the most common deployment method a single docker run command and you're up.
One notable difference: Pi-hole does not run natively on Windows, while AdGuard Home does. If Windows is your only server option, that decision is already made for you.
Both tools have excellent documentation and active communities. First-time setup for either takes under 15 minutes for most people.
Port conflict tip: If you're running Pi-hole alongside other web-facing services on the same machine, change Pi-hole's web interface port during setup to avoid conflicts. Port 80 is commonly used by other tools in a home server environment.
User Interface Comparison PI-HOLE WINS
Pi-hole has a colorful, information-dense dashboard built for active monitoring. Real-time query charts are interactive and granular you can filter by client, inspect blocked domains by frequency, and track query trends over any time window. Several UI themes are available for those who want to customize the look.
AdGuard Home takes a cleaner, more minimal approach with both light and dark modes. The interface looks polished, but the activity charts are smaller and offer less interactivity than Pi-hole's. If you want to actively observe what's happening across your network hour by hour, Pi-hole's dashboard gives you considerably more to work with.
The practical difference: Pi-hole rewards users who like to monitor and tune their setup. AdGuard Home is better suited to those who want to configure it once and let it run quietly in the background.
Setup & Configuration ADGUARD WINS
Upstream DNS Resolvers
Both tools let you select which DNS provider handles queries that aren't blocked. Pi-hole offers a clean list of popular providers like Cloudflare, Google, and Quad9 with one-click selection, plus a field for custom entries. AdGuard Home requires you to type in the address but compensates by offering a browsable catalog of hundreds of DNS servers to choose from.
Blocklists
This is where AdGuard Home gains a clear advantage. Pi-hole lets you add blocklists from any URL but has no built-in discovery mechanism you have to find the lists yourself from community sources like firebog.net. It's not difficult, but it's an extra step.
AdGuard Home includes a built-in catalog of curated blocklists covering ads, trackers, malware, gambling, and more. Adding comprehensive protection takes seconds rather than minutes of research.
Local DNS Records
Both tools support local DNS entries, letting you assign friendly names to devices on your network (so you can type nas.home instead of 192.168.1.50). Pi-hole manages A and CNAME records separately; AdGuard Home combines both into a single "DNS rewrites" list. The difference is minor both approaches work well.
Feature Comparison ADGUARD WINS
Per-Client Control
Pi-hole uses a group system: you create groups, assign clients to them by IP or MAC address, and then link blocklists to those groups. It works reliably and gives you reasonable granularity.
AdGuard Home goes further. Every individual client can have its own upstream DNS server, its own custom blocking rules, and even a schedule for when blocking is active. Want to block social media on your kids' tablets only during school hours? AdGuard Home can do that. Pi-hole cannot.
Parental Controls and Category Blocking
AdGuard Home includes built-in parental controls and the ability to force SafeSearch on major search engines. It also lets you block entire categories of services gambling, cryptocurrency, adult content, social media with a single toggle. These features simply don't exist in Pi-hole without significant manual configuration.
For households with children or anyone wanting a quick way to manage what's accessible on the network, AdGuard Home is in a different league here.
Security & Privacy ADGUARD WINS
Both tools support DNSSEC, which validates that responses from your upstream DNS resolver haven't been tampered with in transit. That's a useful baseline protection.
However, DNSSEC is not the same as DNS encryption. DNSSEC verifies the integrity of responses; DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT) actually encrypt your DNS traffic so your ISP cannot see which domains you're querying.
AdGuard Home supports DoH and DoT natively. Pi-hole does not you need to install additional software like Unbound or cloudflared and configure them manually to achieve equivalent encryption.
A note on DNS privacy: Even with encrypted DNS, your ISP can see the IP addresses of sites you visit. Your DNS provider (like Cloudflare) can see your queries. True network privacy requires a VPN on top and then your VPN provider sees your traffic instead. There is no perfect solution, but DoH/DoT is still significantly better than sending DNS queries in plain text.
Real-World Performance
In practice, both tools perform reliably at DNS-level blocking, but the numbers reveal some interesting patterns. On a home network with around 27 connected devices, Pi-hole typically intercepts 15–17% of all DNS queries in a given day a figure that covers ad networks, analytics platforms, and background telemetry from apps and operating systems. Some unexpected sources show up regularly in blocked domain lists: Apple and certain privacy-focused browsers generate more DNS requests to ad-adjacent domains than most users would expect.
AdGuard Home's default blocklist configuration tends to start conservative, blocking around 7–8% of queries out of the box. The real potential unlocks when you add additional lists from the built-in catalog block rates climb to 18% or higher, which shows just how much the choice of blocklists affects real-world results. It's worth spending 10 minutes on the blocklist catalog during initial setup.
One notable AdGuard Home behavior: it uses a latency-based round robin system when multiple upstream DNS servers are configured. In most setups this means Cloudflare handles the majority of queries since it typically responds faster than alternatives like Quad9. This is an automatic optimization that Pi-hole doesn't replicate without manual configuration.
Side-by-Side Comparison Table
| Category | Pi-hole | AdGuard Home | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Installation ease | Very easy | Very easy | Draw |
| Windows support | No | Yes | AdGuard Home |
| Dashboard & UI | Rich, interactive charts | Clean but limited charts | Pi-hole |
| Blocklist catalog | Manual URLs only | Built-in catalog | AdGuard Home |
| Per-client controls | Group-based | Individual + scheduling | AdGuard Home |
| Parental controls | No (manual setup) | Yes (built-in) | AdGuard Home |
| DNS encryption (DoH/DoT) | Requires extra setup | Native support | AdGuard Home |
| DNSSEC | Yes | Yes | Draw |
| Community & support | Very large | Growing | Pi-hole |
| Configuration backup | Teleporter tool (easy) | YAML file (manual) | Pi-hole |
| Category blocking | No | Yes | AdGuard Home |
| SafeSearch enforcement | No | Yes | AdGuard Home |
The Verdict: AdGuard Home for New Setups, Pi-hole If You're Already Running It
AdGuard Home edges out Pi-hole on the features that matter most for modern home networks: native DNS encryption, per-client scheduling, built-in parental controls, and a blocklist catalog that removes the research burden. For anyone setting up DNS-level blocking for the first time in 2025, AdGuard Home is the stronger choice.
That said, Pi-hole is excellent. If you already have it running and it's working well, there is no compelling reason to migrate. Pi-hole blocks ads just as effectively, has a more information-rich dashboard, and benefits from years of community knowledge and third-party tooling. The gap between them is real but not enormous.
Setting Up Redundancy
Whichever tool you choose, running a single DNS server is a single point of failure. If your server goes offline for maintenance, a crash, or a power blip DNS resolution stops. Websites stop loading. Every device on your network grinds to a halt.
The solution is a secondary DNS node running on a different physical machine. Configure your router's DHCP settings to hand out both IPs as DNS servers, so devices automatically fall back to the secondary if the primary is unreachable.
Redundancy with Pi-hole
Pi-hole includes a built-in tool called Teleporter that exports your entire configuration blocklists, whitelist, local DNS records, group settings into a single archive file. Import that file into a second Pi-hole instance and they're in sync. It's genuinely one of Pi-hole's most practical advantages.
Redundancy with AdGuard Home
AdGuard Home stores all its configuration in a single file: AdGuardHome.yaml. To sync two nodes, copy that file from your primary server to the secondary. It works, but it requires SSH access and some comfort with the command line. Community tools like AdGuard Home Sync automate this process if you find yourself making frequent changes.
Alternatives Worth Knowing
Pi-hole and AdGuard Home dominate the conversation, but they're not the only options:
- Unbound A recursive DNS resolver that queries authoritative DNS servers directly, removing the need for a third-party DNS provider entirely. More private, more complex.
- Technitium DNS Server A full-featured DNS server with ad blocking capabilities, extensive protocol support, and a polished web UI. Worth exploring for advanced users.
- NextDNS A cloud-based alternative that requires no self-hosting. Offers similar features to AdGuard Home via a subscription service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bikram Bhujel is an IT Infrastructure Specialist based in Nepal, writing about enterprise networking, server administration, and home lab setups at bikrambhujel.com.np
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