Hey, not sure if this is the right community, but looking for some information.

I’ve seen many people strongly recommend AdGuard Home for network-wide ad-blocking either in isolation, or in direct comparison to Pihole. But I can’t really find why there is such a strong recommendation. The only clear reason I’ve seen is that AdGuard is easier to set-up.

However, I already have Pihole set-up on all of my networks on separate Raspberry Pis at each location. I have it running as the DNS server so that every device that connects to the network automatically gets ad-blocking. I have a few groups set-up within Pihole for slightly nuanced blocking — i.e. some of my family still want to use Facebook etc. (on a separate subnet).

So my question is, considering I already have Pihole set-up, am I missing some key benefit that AdGuard Home would provide?

  • @mea_rahEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    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.