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?
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.
That’s more-or-less what I thought. And in fact I forgot to add to my post that I also use Pihole on the go via Wireguard, which seems like another hurdle to converting to AdGuard. Thanks.
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).
It can also run directly on lower powered machines. GL.iNet routers are a good example, they’re based on OpenWrt and come with AdGuard Home support out of the box, so no need for a whole external computer to handle DNS stuff. Sure it’s limited by ram about how many lists you can have, but still. Pihole is much more “substantial”
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!
I’m super new to all this but piehole has clients and groups which I assume is for applying custom rules
PiHole has everything you listed except the static dns via web ui. You need to add them to the hosts file.
That’s awesome, I’ll have to give it a try again! I saw they also recently added an external-dns target for pihole for kubernetes which was the real genesis of needing an internal dns server anyway.
In the same boat as you here. Tried both and went back to Pi-hole because “why not?”
Adguard does have homeassistant setup which was nice and easy, but I like to compartmentaliz my setup so if homeassistant goes offline my internet does not go out when adguard is down.
Since I started running pfsense on a custom PC with dedicated NIC, unbound has been my go to choice now for DNS and Adblock. I use Pi-hole on specific subnets now.
