Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home (2026): Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use?

Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: The Short Answer

Pi-hole and AdGuard Home block the same ads and both are free. Choose AdGuard Home if you want encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT) and per-client rules working in about 10 minutes from one binary. Choose Pi-hole if you value the larger community, deeper query diagnostics, and a decade of maturity. Both block the same ads; neither is wrong.

Full breakdown below – or run the numbers on the hardware side with the RTM Toolbox power calculator.

Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: feature comparison

Here is how they stack up on the features that actually matter:

Where Pi-hole wins

Community and ecosystem

Pi-hole has been around since 2014. It has a massive community, an enormous library of curated blocklists, countless guides and tutorials, and a busy forum and subreddit. If you hit a problem, someone has already solved it and posted the answer. This matters more than any individual feature because DNS filtering involves a lot of “this specific thing broke and I need to fix it.”

The blocklist ecosystem is where this advantage is most tangible. Lists like Steven Black, OISD, Hagezi, and dozens of others are primarily maintained and tested against Pi-hole. They work with AdGuard Home too, but the testing and community feedback loop centres on Pi-hole.

Query logging and diagnostics

Pi-hole’s query log is genuinely excellent. You can filter by client, domain, status, time range, and type. When something breaks (and something always breaks), Pi-hole’s logs make it relatively quick to find the blocked domain causing the issue. AdGuard Home’s query log is good, but its filtering and export options are thinner than Pi-hole’s on the documented feature set.

Gravity database

Pi-hole stores its blocklist data in a SQLite database (called Gravity), which handles millions of entries efficiently. The gravity update process is well-tested and reliable. You can query the database directly for advanced analysis if you are comfortable with SQL. It is a solid, proven architecture.

Maturity and stability

Pi-hole has been running production DNS for home networks since 2014. The failure modes are well documented, the edge cases are known, and the project has a long track record of stability. It is not exciting, but for something that sits between your entire network and the internet, boring reliability is exactly what you want.

Where AdGuard Home wins

Encrypted DNS out of the box

This is AdGuard Home’s most significant technical advantage. DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, and DNS-over-QUIC all work natively, both for your devices talking to AdGuard Home and for AdGuard Home talking to its upstream resolvers. Pi-hole does neither on its own. To encrypt its upstream lookups you run a separate forwarder alongside it (dnscrypt-proxy, or Unbound forwarding over TLS) and point Pi-hole at that. Older guides use cloudflared for this, but Cloudflare deprecated its proxy-dns feature in November 2025 and, per the Pi-hole documentation, cloudflared updated after 2 February 2026 no longer works that way, so do not start a new install that way. Pi-hole has no option for serving DoH or DoT to your own devices.

Encrypted DNS matters because traditional DNS queries are sent in plaintext. Your ISP can see every domain your DNS server looks up. Encrypting the upstream leg hides that from your ISP; encrypting the leg between your devices and the DNS server (which only AdGuard Home does natively) protects queries on the local network too. If you care about DNS privacy (and if you are running a DNS filter, you probably do), AdGuard Home makes encrypted DNS trivially easy.

User interface

AdGuard Home has a better UI. There is no diplomatic way to say this. Pi-hole’s interface is functional and gets the job done, but the v5 interface looked like it was designed in 2015 because it was. AdGuard Home’s dashboard is modern, responsive, and genuinely pleasant to use. If you are the kind of person who checks their DNS dashboard regularly (and I am), the interface matters.

Pi-hole v6 has since shipped and replaced the old lighttpd-based admin with pihole-FTL’s own web server, which narrows the gap. AdGuard Home still has the more polished interface, but “Pi-hole’s UI is dated” is a weaker argument in 2026 than it was. One v6 consequence worth knowing if you run other services on the same host: pihole-FTL now binds its own web ports. It uses 80 and 443 by default and falls back to 8080 and 8443 if those are taken, and an upgraded install can end up listening on 8443, which is also the UniFi Network controller’s UI port. Check webserver.port after installing or upgrading.

Per-client configuration

AdGuard Home handles per-client settings natively and cleanly. You can set different upstream DNS servers, different filtering rules, and different safe search settings for each client. Pi-hole added group management in v5, which achieves similar results, but the implementation is less intuitive. AdGuard Home’s approach feels designed-in rather than bolted-on.

AdBlock-style rule support

AdGuard Home supports AdBlock-style filter syntax in addition to standard hosts files and domain lists. This means you can use rules that match URL patterns, not just domain names. In practice this gives you more granular control over what gets blocked, though the difference is marginal for most users because DNS-level blocking is inherently domain-based.

Safe search and parental controls

AdGuard Home has built-in safe search enforcement and parental control categories. You can force safe search on Google, YouTube, and other search engines, and you can block entire categories like gambling or adult content without needing to find and add specific blocklists. Pi-hole can achieve similar results through blocklists, but AdGuard Home makes it a checkbox.

If you have children on your network and want category-based filtering with minimal configuration, AdGuard Home is the clear winner here.

Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: performance

Both are fast. For a home network, either answers cached queries far faster than any device will notice, and the time that matters is the upstream lookup, which is the same whichever filter sits in front of it. Both run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi.

Resource usage is similarly close. Memory use depends mostly on how many blocklist entries you load and how much query history you keep, and neither will stress any hardware made in the last decade. If you are running either on a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, or a server, resource usage is a non-issue.

The one area where performance differs is the initial blocklist load. Pi-hole’s Gravity update on a large blocklist (several million entries) takes a noticeable time on small hardware, because it rebuilds a database. Both are one-time operations that run in the background and do not affect query performance.

Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: setup complexity

AdGuard Home is easier to set up. It is a single binary (or Docker container) with a web-based setup wizard. The entire configuration lives in a single YAML file. There is no separate web server, no database, no additional services to manage.

Pi-hole’s native installation is also straightforward (one curl command). Since v6 (February 2025) it no longer installs lighttpd or PHP: the web interface and API are served by pihole-FTL itself. You still have more to configure, especially in Docker (see the two settings below). If you want encrypted DNS, you are deploying additional services.

For someone who has never run a DNS filter before, AdGuard Home will have them up and running faster with less room for error.

Docker Compose: Both Deployments Side by Side

Here are both deployments as Docker Compose files so you can try either (or both) with minimal effort.

Pi-hole Docker Compose

# docker-compose.yml (Pi-hole v6)
services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: Europe/London
      FTLCONF_webserver_api_password: your-secure-password
      FTLCONF_dns_upstreams: "1.1.1.1;9.9.9.9"
      FTLCONF_dns_listeningMode: "ALL"
      FTLCONF_misc_etc_dnsmasq_d: "true"
    volumes:
      - ./etc-pihole:/etc/pihole
      - ./etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN

docker exec pihole pihole-FTL --config dns.listeningMode all
docker exec pihole pihole-FTL --config misc.etc_dnsmasq_d true
docker restart pihole

AdGuard Home Docker Compose

# docker-compose.yml (AdGuard Home)
services:
  adguardhome:
    container_name: adguardhome
    image: adguard/adguardhome:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "3000:3000/tcp"   # Initial setup wizard
      - "8080:80/tcp"     # Web interface (after setup)
      - "443:443/tcp"     # HTTPS (optional, for DoH)
      - "853:853/tcp"     # DNS-over-TLS (optional)
    volumes:
      - ./work:/opt/adguardhome/work
      - ./conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf

Note that AdGuard Home uses port 3000 for the initial setup wizard. After configuration, the web interface runs on port 80 (mapped to 8080 above). The DoH (443) and DoT (853) ports are optional but recommended if you want encrypted DNS.

Both require the same systemd-resolved fix on Ubuntu. See the Pi-hole Docker guide for the exact steps.

Migration: Switching Between Them

If you are already running one and want to switch, the process is simple in concept but fiddly in practice. Neither has a native import/export that works with the other. You will need to:

1. Export your custom allowlist and denylist entries (manually or via API)
2. Note your blocklist URLs (these are just URLs, they work in both)
3. Stop the old service
4. Deploy the new one
5. Re-add your blocklist URLs
6. Re-add your allowlist and custom DNS entries

Blocklist URLs are interchangeable — the same URLs work in both. Custom DNS records and allowlist entries need manual recreation. If you have extensive group management rules in Pi-hole, recreating the equivalent per-client configuration in AdGuard Home is the most time-consuming part.

Is Pi-hole still relevant in 2026?

Yes. DNS-level blocking still removes ads and telemetry for every device on the network, including the ones you cannot install an extension on: televisions, consoles, thermostats, anything with firmware you do not control. What has changed is that Pi-hole is no longer the only mature option, and v6 rebuilt the admin interface on pihole-FTL’s own web server rather than lighttpd. The case against it is not that it stopped working, it is that AdGuard Home now covers the same ground with less setup.

Is AdGuard a Russian company?

It is a fair question and the honest answer has two halves. AdGuard was founded in Moscow in 2009 and later moved its headquarters; the company that publishes it today is AdGuard Software Limited, incorporated in Cyprus with a registered address in Limassol. So the origin is Russian and the current corporate registration is not.

For a self-hoster the more useful point is that it barely matters at this layer. AdGuard Home is open source, it runs entirely on your hardware, and it does not phone home to operate. You can read the code, and you can watch its outbound traffic yourself. That is a stronger guarantee than any company’s jurisdiction, and it is the same standard you should apply to Pi-hole.

Are there any downsides to Pi-hole?

Four worth knowing before you commit:

• It becomes a single point of failure. If the box running it dies, every device that has it as their only resolver stops resolving anything. Run a second instance or set a working secondary on your DHCP scope.
• Encrypted DNS is not built in. Encrypted upstream lookups need a separate forwarder alongside it (dnscrypt-proxy, or Unbound over TLS; cloudflared’s DNS proxy has been withdrawn), and it cannot serve DoH or DoT to your devices at all. AdGuard Home ships with both.
• The containerised v6 defaults are wrong for LAN use and fail silently, as covered above.
• Blocking at DNS is coarse. It cannot strip an ad served from the same domain as the content, which is why YouTube ads survive it.

Is there anything better than Pi-hole?

Not in a way that makes switching obviously correct. AdGuard Home is the closest like-for-like and wins on setup time and built-in encrypted DNS. Beyond those two, Blocky and Technitium DNS Server are worth knowing about if you want a resolver that does more than filtering, and NextDNS is the answer if you would rather not host anything at all, at the cost of moving your query log to someone else. For most home labs the honest ranking is that Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are joint first and the rest are situational.

My Recommendation

I use Pi-hole. I chose it because of the community size, the ecosystem of blocklists and tools, and the detailed query logging that makes troubleshooting straightforward. I also chose it because when I started, AdGuard Home was less mature, and inertia is a powerful force in infrastructure decisions.

But if I were starting from scratch today, I would seriously consider AdGuard Home. The built-in encrypted DNS alone is a significant advantage. The per-client configuration is cleaner. The UI is better. And the setup is simpler.

Here is my honest recommendation:

• Choose Pi-hole if: You want maximum customisation, you enjoy managing blocklists and groups, you want the largest community for troubleshooting, or you plan to pair it with Unbound for recursive DNS. Pi-hole rewards tinkering.
• Choose AdGuard Home if: You want encrypted DNS without additional services, you want per-client filtering with a clean interface, you have children and want built-in parental controls, or you want something that works well with minimal ongoing management. AdGuard Home rewards simplicity.
• Either way: You are making the right decision by running a DNS filter at all. Both are open source, both are actively maintained, both will dramatically improve your network’s privacy and reduce your exposure to tracking. The difference between them is much smaller than the difference between either of them and having no DNS filtering at all.

Related Guides

If you found this useful, these guides continue the journey:

• Pi-hole Docker Setup — Run Pi-hole in Docker for network-wide ad blocking.
• Pi-hole on Ubuntu 24.04 — Install Pi-hole directly on Ubuntu 24.04 for a dedicated DNS server.
• Docker Compose Beginner’s Guide — Learn how to define and manage multi-container applications.
• How to Build Your First Homelab in 2026 — Start your self-hosting journey with a practical homelab build.
• Grafana and Prometheus Homelab Monitoring — Monitor your homelab services with dashboards and alerting.

Before you expose any of this: the seven steps that decide whether a home lab survives contact with the internet, in the order they matter, are in How to Secure a Homelab Network in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Pi-hole and AdGuard Home?

Pi-hole is a mature, lightweight DNS sinkhole focused on network-wide ad blocking. AdGuard Home is a newer, all-in-one DNS filter with built-in parental controls, encrypted DNS (DoH, DoT, DoQ) out of the box, and a polished UI. Pi-hole favours modularity; AdGuard Home favours integration.

Which is faster, Pi-hole or AdGuard Home?

In real-world home network conditions the performance difference is negligible. Both comfortably run on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, and memory use for either depends mostly on how many blocklist entries you load.

Is AdGuard Home better than Pi-hole for beginners?

Yes. AdGuard Home’s single binary install, built-in DoH/DoT/DoQ support, and integrated parental controls mean less setup and fewer add-ons for typical home use. Pi-hole is still excellent, but it expects you to be comfortable editing configs and running a separate forwarder if you want encrypted DNS.

Can I use Pi-hole and AdGuard Home together?

Technically yes, by chaining one as the upstream resolver of the other, but it is almost never worth it. The block lists overlap, the resolver paths double up, and troubleshooting becomes harder. Pick one and commit.

Do Pi-hole and AdGuard Home work with DoH and DoT?

AdGuard Home supports DNS over HTTPS, DNS over TLS and DNS over QUIC natively, both to your devices and to its upstreams, with no extra setup. Pi-hole can only encrypt its upstream lookups, and only through a separate forwarder such as dnscrypt-proxy or Unbound over TLS; it cannot serve DoH or DoT to your devices.

Eric Lonsdale

ReadTheManual is run, written and curated by Eric Lonsdale.

Eric has over 20 years of professional experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, and  cybersecurity, but started with PCs long before that.

He built his first machine from parts bought off tables at the local college campus, hoping they worked. He learned on BBC Micros and Atari units in the early 90s, and has built almost every PC he’s used between 1995 and now.

From helpdesk to infrastructure architect, Eric has worked across enterprise datacentres, Azure environments, and security operations. He’s managed teams, trained engineers, and spent two decades solving the problems this site teaches you to solve.

ReadTheManual exists because Eric believes the best way to learn IT is to build things, break things, and actually read the manual. Every guide on this site runs on infrastructure he owns and maintains.

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