Pi-hole vs AdGuard: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use?

Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that has been around since 2014. It runs on a device you own, most commonly a Raspberry Pi, and acts as your network's DNS server. When any device on your network asks "where is analytics.example.com," Pi-hole checks the domain against its blocklists. If it is a known ad or tracking domain, Pi-hole returns a blank answer and the connection is never made. The software is open source, maintained by volunteers and supported by donations, and has a huge library of community-maintained blocklists.

AdGuard is, confusingly, several products. AdGuard Home is the self-hosted DNS blocker, the direct competitor to Pi-hole. It is also free and open source, built by the company behind the AdGuard ad blocker apps. It installs as a single program on Linux, macOS, Windows or FreeBSD, or as a Docker container. When people say "Pi-hole vs AdGuard" they almost always mean Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home. AdGuard also offers AdGuard DNS (a cloud DNS service) and AdGuard apps for desktop and mobile, but those are separate products.

Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home do the same fundamental thing: block domains at the DNS layer before your devices can connect to them. The differences show up in features, setup and upkeep.

The single biggest difference is encrypted DNS. AdGuard Home can talk to upstream resolvers over DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS or DNSCrypt, and it can serve DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS to your own devices, all without extra software. Pi-hole has no built-in encrypted DNS. To get it, you run a separate tool such as dnscrypt-proxy next to Pi-hole, or use Unbound as your own recursive resolver. It works, but it is one more thing to maintain and one more point of failure.

Both have a web dashboard. Pi-hole v6, released in February 2025, came with a redesigned interface split into basic and expert settings, and its web server is now built into Pi-hole itself. AdGuard Home's setup wizard walks you through blocklists, upstream DNS and encryption on first launch. Pi-hole's installer runs in the terminal; after that you manage it in the browser.

AdGuard Home has more filtering features built in. It supports AdGuard-style rules (close to uBlock syntax) alongside hosts files and regular expressions, and parental controls, safe search enforcement and phishing and malware protection are included. Pi-hole works with domain blocklists and regular expressions and leaves parental controls and malware protection to extra lists. Both support different settings per device. Both can block the same domains; AdGuard Home can express more complex rules without extra tooling.

Performance is not a deciding factor for a home network. Both are light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi or an old mini PC.

If you have never used Linux, AdGuard Home is easier: one program, a web setup wizard, and encrypted DNS without follow-up configuration.

If you are comfortable with a terminal, both are roughly equal. Pi-hole's one-line installer (a curl command piped to bash) is famously simple, and AdGuard Home has a comparable install command. Both then require you to point your router's DNS settings at the new server. That step trips up most people, whichever tool they chose. Plan an evening for the first setup, more if you are also preparing a Raspberry Pi from scratch.

Upkeep differs in the details. Both refresh their blocklists automatically (Pi-hole once a week by default, AdGuard Home on an interval you set). Pi-hole updates from the command line; AdGuard Home can update itself from the web interface. Both let you back up and restore the configuration: Pi-hole through its Teleporter export, AdGuard Home through its configuration file. With Pi-hole, encrypted DNS adds a second tool to keep running.

Neither tool is truly "set it and forget it." You are running a DNS server. When it breaks, your whole network loses name resolution until you fix it or switch DNS. Plan for that: configure a fallback resolver on your router, or be ready to switch back quickly.

Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are free and open source, and neither has a paid tier. The real cost is hardware and time. You need a Raspberry Pi or another device that runs around the clock. If you already run a home server, NAS or mini PC, you need no extra hardware: you add a container.

The hidden cost is time: the first setup, plus occasional maintenance when an update changes something or a blocklist starts breaking a site you need. For hobbyists this is part of the fun; for people who just want fewer trackers, it is a common reason to give up after a few weeks.

On privacy: self-hosting keeps the query log on your own hardware, which is the main advantage over cloud services like NextDNS. But the queries your blocker cannot answer itself still go to an upstream resolver, and that resolver sees them. Which one that is depends on what you choose during setup.

If privacy is your main goal, choose an upstream resolver whose privacy policy you trust and connect to it over encrypted DNS, or run your own recursive resolver such as Unbound so no single upstream provider sees all your queries.

Neither tool can tell you which app on your Mac made a connection. Both work at the DNS layer, which only sees "some device on the network asked for analytics.example.com." Was it your browser? A background updater? A chat app's telemetry? At the DNS layer, you cannot tell.

This matters on macOS because a Mac runs many processes that connect on their own: system services, cloud sync, updaters, crash reporters and the background helpers many apps install. DNS blocking catches the ones that use known tracker domains. It does not catch apps that send telemetry to their own first-party servers, since blocking those domains would break the app. And an app that connects straight to an IP address never asks DNS at all, so your DNS blocker sees nothing.

The fix is pairing DNS blocking with per-app control. NetMute runs on your Mac and shows which app made which connection, to which domain, and how much data it sent. Tracker Shield blocks known tracker domains without a prompt per connection (the 50 most active in the free version, 300+ with Pro). More important here, you see when one app is quietly sending data somewhere and can take that app offline with one switch, instead of blocking a whole domain for the whole network. And because it runs on the Mac, it keeps working in hotels, offices and on phone hotspots, where your home DNS blocker does not reach.

A sensible setup: Pi-hole or AdGuard Home on your home network for every device (smart TVs, phones and other devices), plus NetMute on each Mac for per-app visibility and control. DNS blocking gives broad coverage; a per-app firewall adds depth on the machine you use most.

NetMute is free to download, with Pro as a one-time purchase, no subscription and no account.