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?
Been running a pi-hole with unbound for years here. Apart from updating the roots file every six months its been sitting there doing it’s thing happily without skipping a beat.
I did take a small look at Adguard but couldn’t see anything like the tail pihole log option which I tend to have in a tab as I like to see what’s going on.
I’ve been using a pihole exclusively for years on my Ubiquiti network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it’s a stable, easy ad-blocking solution. I’ve never even considered moving from it, seeing how well pihole Just Works.
That’s more-or-less what I thought. And in fact I forgot to add to my post that I also use Pihole on the go via Wireguard, which seems like another hurdle to converting to AdGuard. Thanks.
It has to go upstream for answered requests, so it can add 1 or 2 ms to the 45 ms it would otherwise take when you’re local. If you’re using a VPN to your home dns, it can add 75 ms and I can feel it.
If you bother that much, why not just use the Pi as an OpenWRT router with DNS over HTTPS, and get a great router with awesome QoS and actual software updates in the process?
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.
I have run my own PiHole previously. Then I wanted Ad blocking on my phone, so I also setup OpenVPN that ran alongside my PiHole so I could get ad blocking anywhere. I travel often, and then we moved, so I never got it set up again, at the same time I discovered AdGuard could be configured on both home networks for network-level blocking, but they also have device profiles for iOS.
I haven’t had to fuss with PiHole now in years.
If you are happy to do the administration of a PiHole, and the scope it provides, it’s good. I didn’t want to have to fuss with it anymore.
You can’t really go wrong with any of those. They are both very solid options. Having said that, if I had to recommend one, I’d go with Adguard, because:
The interface is better. Most notably the query log interface. Searching the logs with some long time span makes Pihole spike in memory usage and is super slow. (there’s no server-side pagination)
Custom filters are more powerful thanks to modifiers, which AFAIK Pihole does not support. Some of it can be configured via dnsmasq (without user friendly interface), some I had not found any solution for. Good example is dnstype modifier, which I sometimes use to block AAAA responses for sites, that have set AAAA records, but the service actually does not work over IPv6. So I can disable IPv6 for certain domains if I need to. (or other way around, force IPv6 only)
Some of the above might have changed, I haven’t used Pihole for about a year.
In the same boat as you here. Tried both and went back to Pi-hole because “why not?”
Adguard does have homeassistant setup which was nice and easy, but I like to compartmentaliz my setup so if homeassistant goes offline my internet does not go out when adguard is down.
Since I started running pfsense on a custom PC with dedicated NIC, unbound has been my go to choice now for DNS and Adblock. I use Pi-hole on specific subnets now.
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Does AdGuard Home have proper IPv6 support meanwhile? I remember the lack thereof made me switch back to pi-hole a few years ago.
Yes, no problem with IPv6.
Been running a pi-hole with unbound for years here. Apart from updating the roots file every six months its been sitting there doing it’s thing happily without skipping a beat. I did take a small look at Adguard but couldn’t see anything like the tail pihole log option which I tend to have in a tab as I like to see what’s going on.
I’ve been using a pihole exclusively for years on my Ubiquiti network at home. Combined with Wireguard, it’s a stable, easy ad-blocking solution. I’ve never even considered moving from it, seeing how well pihole Just Works.
That’s more-or-less what I thought. And in fact I forgot to add to my post that I also use Pihole on the go via Wireguard, which seems like another hurdle to converting to AdGuard. Thanks.
You can use a private Adblocking DNS on all OS at this point.
Adguard home would also work exactly the same way as pihole for that use case.
Does pihole affects your internet speed?
It has to go upstream for answered requests, so it can add 1 or 2 ms to the 45 ms it would otherwise take when you’re local. If you’re using a VPN to your home dns, it can add 75 ms and I can feel it.
If you bother that much, why not just use the Pi as an OpenWRT router with DNS over HTTPS, and get a great router with awesome QoS and actual software updates in the process?
It’s a vast superset of whatever PiHole does.
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
I have run my own PiHole previously. Then I wanted Ad blocking on my phone, so I also setup OpenVPN that ran alongside my PiHole so I could get ad blocking anywhere. I travel often, and then we moved, so I never got it set up again, at the same time I discovered AdGuard could be configured on both home networks for network-level blocking, but they also have device profiles for iOS.
I haven’t had to fuss with PiHole now in years.
If you are happy to do the administration of a PiHole, and the scope it provides, it’s good. I didn’t want to have to fuss with it anymore.
FWIW I tried AdGuard as I liked the look of some of its features but it slowed my connection down massively - sites would take ages to load.
I may have done something wrong but I tried quite a few things but went back to PiHole as I’ve never had any issues with it.
YMMV
You can’t really go wrong with any of those. They are both very solid options. Having said that, if I had to recommend one, I’d go with Adguard, because:
Some of the above might have changed, I haven’t used Pihole for about a year.
removed by mod
In the same boat as you here. Tried both and went back to Pi-hole because “why not?”
Adguard does have homeassistant setup which was nice and easy, but I like to compartmentaliz my setup so if homeassistant goes offline my internet does not go out when adguard is down.
Since I started running pfsense on a custom PC with dedicated NIC, unbound has been my go to choice now for DNS and Adblock. I use Pi-hole on specific subnets now.