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

I used both and Adguard looks more buggy for me. And also it is heavier.
- And also it is heavier
  I can't say I'm seeing the same.
  Pihole CPU and memory usage (these are 1 week stats):
  
  Same for Adguard:
  
  So both are kind of the same unless you run on very limited hardware. The docker images are about 100MB for Pihole and 20MB for Adguard. This is probably most important parameter as you can run Adguard on some routers, that have very limited flash storage, but again only matters on extremely limited HW, something like Raspberry Pi has orders of magnitude more resources.
  
  Adguard Home works really bad on RPi Zero and not as fast as PiHole on Rpi3B+. That's why Adguard is heavier for me.
  
  That's fair. Wonder why that is, because my experience is quite the opposite.
  The metrics I shared above actually had the Pihole running on much more powerful HW. (proper server with quite beefy CPU) The Adguard stats are from old Intel NUC which is perfomance-wise about on par with Rpi3B+. As you can see it barely uses any resources at all. So I'm surprised to see you reporting the performance as really bad.
  I was testing Adguard on small openwrt based device and it still ran fine. Rpi3B+ has order of magnitude faster HW than that. I just don't see how would Adguard be slower or even noticeably slow. Or even Pihole. Both could run about 40 copies of the service on single Pi3.
  Whis is not to say I don't trust you, it's just strange.

57 comments