Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home

Pi-hole v6 landed in February 2025 and was the biggest rework in the project's history. The web interface and a new REST API are now embedded directly in the pihole-FTL binary, so lighttpd and PHP are gone from the stack entirely. FTL binds ports 80 and 443 itself and falls back to 8080/8443 if something else owns them. Configuration consolidated into /etc/pihole/pihole.toml, and the project has kept a steady release pace since (FTL 6.6.2 shipped May 2026 with a batch of upstream dnsmasq CVE fixes). Install is still the famous one-liner, curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash, or the official pihole/pihole Docker image. It remains Linux only: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS Stream, Raspberry Pi OS.

AdGuard Home has been a single Go binary since day one, so v6 mostly brought Pi-hole to where AdGuard Home already was architecturally. You install it with their script (curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v), the adguard/adguardhome Docker image, or a Snap. First boot serves a setup wizard on port 3000 that walks you through picking listen interfaces and creating an admin account. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OpenWrt routers, which matters if your homelab is a NAS or a repurposed office PC rather than a Pi.

Either one is a ten-minute install. The practical difference is portability: Pi-hole assumes a Linux box, AdGuard Home runs basically anywhere you can copy a binary.

AdGuard Home does encrypted DNS in both directions natively. Give it a TLS certificate and it will answer clients over DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-QUIC, and DNSCrypt. Upstream, it speaks all of those too, and the default upstream out of the box is Quad9 over DoH (https://dns10.quad9.net/dns-query), so your queries leave the house encrypted without you touching anything. The ClientID feature is the sleeper hit: a device connecting via DoT or DoQ can identify itself in the hostname (like eliza-tablet.dns.example.com), so per-device rules follow the device even when it is not on your LAN.

Pi-hole speaks plain DNS on port 53, full stop. That is fine inside your network, but if you want encrypted upstream you bolt on cloudflared as a DoH proxy or, better, run unbound as a local recursive resolver. Pi-hole plus unbound is the canonical setup, it is well documented in the official docs, and honestly it is the strongest privacy configuration of anything discussed here because you stop trusting any third-party resolver at all. But it is a second service to install, monitor, and update.

The everyday test: point an Android phone's Private DNS setting at your server. With AdGuard Home that works out of the box once TLS is configured. With Pi-hole it simply cannot, because there is nothing listening on 853. If encrypted client-side DNS is on your wishlist, this comparison is already over.

AdGuard Home treats clients as first-class objects. You define a client by IP, CIDR range, MAC address (when AdGuard Home is your DHCP server), or ClientID, and then give that client its own upstreams, its own blocklists, forced SafeSearch on Google/YouTube/Bing/DuckDuckGo, the adult-content filter, and per-service blocking with schedules. Blocking TikTok and YouTube on the kids' devices on school nights while leaving your desktop untouched is a five-minute GUI task, no custom regex required. Rule syntax supports $client and ctag modifiers, so one rule can target one device.

Pi-hole's answer is the group system, which arrived in v5 and carries into v6. You assign clients to groups and attach adlists, exact domains, and regex entries per group. It genuinely works, and for straightforward cases (a strict list for the kids' VLAN, a permissive one for your lab) it is enough. But there are no SafeSearch toggles, no service presets, and no schedules. You are hand-rolling all of that with regex, cron jobs, and third-party lists.

For a family network, AdGuard Home wins this category outright, and it is not close. Pi-hole's groups are a capable mechanism; AdGuard Home ships the finished feature.

Out of the box, Pi-hole ships with the StevenBlack unified hosts list and AdGuard Home ships with the AdGuard DNS filter. Both let you add as many lists as you want, and blocking effectiveness is functionally identical when fed the same lists, because DNS blocking is DNS blocking. The syntax ceiling differs, though: Pi-hole reads hosts-format lists, simple Adblock-style entries (||example.com^), and its own regex format. AdGuard Home parses full AdGuard rule syntax including modifiers like $dnstype, $dnsrewrite, $important, and $client, which lets a single list do things Pi-hole needs regex plus local DNS records to replicate.

On dashboards, Pi-hole still has the edge for data hoarders. FTL keeps a long-term SQLite query database (365 days by default) and the ecosystem of Grafana dashboards, Home Assistant integrations, and PADD-style status screens built on its API is enormous. AdGuard Home's dashboard is cleaner and does per-client drill-down nicely, with a 24 hour stats window by default and 90 days of query log retention, but the third-party tooling around it is thinner.

Set expectations correctly with either: neither blocks YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook in-app ads, because those are served from the same domains as the content. DNS blocking kills third-party ad domains, trackers, and telemetry. Anyone promising more is selling something.

Performance is a wash at homelab scale. FTL is a lean C daemon and AdGuard Home is a single Go binary; both idle at trivial CPU and a small memory footprint, and both will happily serve a busy household from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W or the smallest VM you can be bothered to create. Do not pick based on benchmarks, you will never feel the difference at home query volumes.

Maintenance and project health both look good in 2026. Pi-hole updates with pihole -up and has a decade of community answers for every error message you will ever see. AdGuard Home is backed by the AdGuard company and ships fixes fast: v0.107.75 patched a DoQ/DoH vulnerability in May 2026 and v0.107.77 closed a path traversal CVE in June 2026. Take that as evidence of an actively maintained project, and also as a reminder to keep whichever one you run updated, since your DNS server sees everything.

Backup and migration are easy on both sides: Pi-hole's Teleporter exports everything in one archive, and AdGuard Home's entire config lives in a single AdGuardHome.yaml you can drop into version control. Running either in Docker makes rebuilds a non-event.