1y ago

Pihole vs AdGuard Home

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?

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57 comments

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
  
  That’s awesome, I’ll have to give it another look. Maybe I’ll have to set up one of each and do some performance testing then :D
- PiHole has everything you listed except the static dns via web ui. You need to add them to the hosts file.
  
  If it's just for local you can add dns hostnames in the gui. I have all my lan boxes defined in pihole with the .lan under the local dbs ootio. Might even work for external too
  
  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.
  
  I've got enough going on, on my internal lan that I have a bind server hosting internal fwd/ptr zones. I just put config files in /etc/dnsmasq.d/ that direct queries for those domains there.

57 comments