Pi-hole vs. AdGuard Home in 2026: a DNS ad-blocker showdown

Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home do the same thing: run a local DNS server that returns NXDOMAIN for known ad/tracker domains. Both work. Both are great. I've run both for months at a time. This essay is the head-to-head from my household, with real block rates, real query-latency numbers, and the reason I landed where I did.

Part of the rig. The DNS server is a tiny Alpine LXC container inside Proxmox, 128 MB RAM, running as part of the subnet router pattern so it's reachable everywhere I'm signed into Tailscale.

Side-by-side

What Pi-hole does better

Pi-hole has a culture. A big forum, a stable plugin ecosystem (Teleporter for backups, PADD for terminal dashboards, Pi-hole remote for iOS), a long memory. You can ask a question in the forum and find an answer from 2019 that still applies.

Pi-hole's dashboard is more focused. When I want to check "what did my partner's iPhone query in the last hour," Pi-hole's query log is the cleaner experience. AdGuard Home's equivalent is functional but busier.

Pi-hole's conditional forwarding to a local DNS server is straightforward. Set the upstream to 192.168.10.1, done. AdGuard Home's equivalent is hidden behind a "custom upstream" config that tripped me up twice.

What AdGuard Home does better

It's simpler to deploy. One binary, one config file, systemctl start, done. No cloudflared sidecar for DoH, no separate dnsmasq config, no three-layer stack to debug when something misbehaves.

Its native DoH-server-for-clients is fantastic. Every device on my tailnet uses my AdGuard Home instance as a DNS-over-HTTPS resolver. That means even on public Wi-Fi, my queries are encrypted end-to-end to my home server, then out to my upstream of choice. Pi-hole can do this with effort; AdGuard Home does it with a checkbox.

Its per-client configuration is cleaner. I have different blocklists for my partner (fewer false positives) vs. my work laptop (stricter) vs. the guest network (nothing but Cloudflare 1.1.1.1). Pi-hole supports this via groups but the UI is less obvious.

Block-rate methodology, because it matters

Both tools report "block rate" as "percentage of queries returning NXDOMAIN." That's a misleading metric. A TV that checks in with its telemetry server every 30 seconds will look like it's being "protected" heavily, but a person browsing the web normally will show a lower rate. My 24.6% vs. 27.8% numbers are from my household with only my laptop + phone + partner's phone as the DNS clients — roughly the same traffic mix over a week. So the delta (~3 percentage points) is real, not measurement error.

The delta comes almost entirely from AdGuard Home's default blocklists being more aggressive. If I load the same blocklists into Pi-hole, the rates converge within 0.5 percentage points. The winner here is "whichever ships with the blocklists you actually want."

The DoH story is where I landed

I travel with my laptop. On public Wi-Fi, the default behavior is that DNS queries go plaintext to whatever server the Wi-Fi router gives me — which means the hotel can see every domain I visit. Not acceptable.

My ideal flow: laptop queries DNS over HTTPS to my AdGuard Home at home, which queries Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 over DoT. The end-to-end path is encrypted; the hotel sees one HTTPS flow to my home, and that's it.

AdGuard Home's native DoH server makes this trivial. I give my laptop a DoH URL like https://dns.home/dns-query (resolved via Tailscale MagicDNS), check one checkbox in AdGuard Home, done. My laptop's /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ file has a single stanza pointing at that URL.

Pi-hole can do this by running cloudflared or dnsdist in front. I have done this. It works. It's two more moving parts to maintain, and each of them has its own release cadence and config syntax.

The config file I actually run

AdGuard Home's entire main config is in /opt/adguard/AdGuardHome.yaml. The 80% of it that matters:

dns:
  bind_hosts:
    - 0.0.0.0
  port: 53
  bootstrap_dns:
    - 1.1.1.1
    - 1.0.0.1
  upstream_dns:
    - https://1.1.1.1/dns-query
    - tls://1.1.1.1
  cache_size: 4194304
  cache_ttl_min: 600
  protection_enabled: true
  filtering_enabled: true
  parental_enabled: false
  safebrowsing_enabled: true
  local_domain_name: home
  blocked_services:
    - tiktok
  anonymize_client_ip: false
filters:
  - enabled: true
    url: https://adguardteam.github.io/HostlistsRegistry/assets/filter_1.txt
    name: AdGuard DNS filter
  - enabled: true
    url: https://big.oisd.nl/
    name: OISD Big
clients:
  persistent:
    - name: partner-phone
      ids: [192.168.10.45]
      filtering_enabled: true
      blocked_services:
        - instagram_ads
    - name: guest-network
      ids: [192.168.50.0/24]
      filtering_enabled: false
      upstreams: [1.1.1.1]

What I'd tell someone starting today

If you've never run either: start with AdGuard Home. Simpler deploy, fewer moving parts, the DoH-for-clients feature pays off forever.

If you already run Pi-hole and it works: stay. The 3-percentage-point block-rate difference and 0.6ms latency difference are not reasons to migrate.

If you need the largest possible community and every possible third-party integration: Pi-hole wins on ecosystem.

If you run both on the same network (one per subnet or one per VLAN): that's fine and I won't judge.

For the rest of the networking layer: Tailscale subnet routers and ACLs in anger. Full stack: The self-hosting stack I actually use in 2026.