Solved: Pi-Hole better than AdGuard?

#devops #programming #tutorial #cloud

🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: Choosing between Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home for network-wide ad-blocking often leads to analysis paralysis, despite both being effective DNS sinkholing tools. The optimal solution depends on specific needs, prioritizing either Pi-Hole’s stability and community support or AdGuard Home’s modern features like native encrypted DNS, with a hybrid approach available for complex environments.

🎯 Key Takeaways

Pi-Hole is a stable, veteran solution built on traditional Linux components (lighttpd, dnsmasq) with extensive community support, ideal for set-and-forget deployments.
AdGuard Home is a modern challenger, a single Go binary offering native support for encrypted DNS protocols (DoH/DoT/DoQ) and a more contemporary user interface.
A hybrid DNS chaining setup allows Pi-Hole to forward requests to AdGuard Home, combining Pi-Hole’s detailed logging and blocklist management with AdGuard Home’s superior encrypted DNS handling for external traffic.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, I break down the Pi-Hole vs. AdGuard Home debate. Stop the analysis paralysis and learn which network-wide ad-blocker fits your real-world needs, from simple home labs to more complex setups.

Pi-Hole vs. AdGuard Home: A Senior Engineer’s Breakdown

I remember a frantic Slack message from one of our sharpest junior engineers, Alex, a few months back. Not about a production outage on prod-k8s-cluster-01, but about his home lab. He’d spent an entire weekend paralyzed, reading Reddit threads, watching YouTube videos, trying to decide between Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. “I just want to block ads on my IoT VLAN,” he wrote, “but I’m stuck in a feature comparison hell.” This hit home. We in the tech world, especially in DevOps, have a tendency to over-engineer solutions to simple problems. We get so caught up in the “what’s best” debate that we forget to ask “what’s right for the job?”

The “Why”: It’s Not a Battle, It’s a Trade-Off

Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t a simple “one is better than the other” situation. The reason this debate is so persistent is that both Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home are excellent tools that solve the same core problem—network-wide ad and tracker blocking via DNS sinkholing—but they do so with different philosophies and feature sets. The “problem” isn’t the software; it’s choosing the tool that aligns with your technical needs, your tolerance for tinkering, and your future plans.

Pi-Hole is the established veteran. It’s built on a foundation of well-known Linux components (like lighttpd and dnsmasq), has a massive community, and is rock-solid. AdGuard Home is the modern challenger, a single Go binary with cutting-edge features like encrypted DNS protocols (DoH/DoT) built-in from the start and a slicker UI. Choosing between them is about picking your priorities.

Solution 1: The “Rock-Solid Classic” (Pi-Hole)

This is my recommendation for anyone who wants to set it, forget it, and know it will just work. If you’re new to self-hosting, or your primary goal is just stable, no-nonsense ad-blocking, start here. The community support is unparalleled, so any problem you encounter, someone has already solved it and written a guide.

When to use it: You prioritize stability and community support over the latest features. You’re running it on low-power hardware like an older Raspberry Pi. You just want to block ads with minimal fuss.

Here’s a dead-simple Docker Compose setup I use for basic deployments on a box I call docker-host-01:

version: "3"

services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp" # Using port 8080 to avoid conflict
    environment:
      TZ: 'America/New_York'
      WEBPASSWORD: 'YourSecurePasswordHere'
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole/:/etc/pihole/'
      - './etc-dnsmasq.d/:/etc/dnsmasq.d/'
    restart: unless-stopped

Pro Tip: Notice I mapped the web UI to port 8080. This is a common practice to avoid conflicts if another service on your host machine is already using port 80. Never assume a port is free.

Solution 2: The “Modern Power-User” (AdGuard Home)

This is for the tinkerer. If you hear “built-in DNS-over-HTTPS” and your eyes light up, AdGuard Home is probably for you. It’s a single, self-contained Go binary, which is incredibly clean from a deployment perspective. The UI feels more modern, and having per-client filtering and encryption settings baked right into the main interface without extra components is a huge win for more advanced users.

When to use it: You want native DoH/DoT/DoQ support. You want a more modern UI and a simpler configuration file (YAML). You appreciate the elegance of a single compiled binary vs. a collection of scripts and services.

Here’s the equivalent Docker Compose for AdGuard Home. Note the slightly different volume structure.

version: "3"

services:
  adguardhome:
    container_name: adguardhome
    image: adguard/adguardhome
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8081:80/tcp"  # Admin UI on 8081
      - "3000:3000/tcp" # Initial setup UI
    volumes:
      - './adguard-work:/opt/adguardhome/work'
      - './adguard-conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf'
    restart: unless-stopped

Solution 3: The “Architect’s Way” (Hybrid DNS Chaining)

Sometimes, in complex environments, the answer isn’t “either/or” but “both, for different reasons.” This is the “hacky but effective” solution for when you want the best of both worlds. You can use one as a forwarder for the other to create a powerful, layered DNS filtering setup.

When to use it: You have complex network requirements, like separate filtering rules for an iot-vlan and a trusted-devices network, and you also want to encrypt all outbound DNS traffic from your network edge.

A real-world scenario I’ve implemented:

Clients Point to Pi-Hole: All devices on the LAN (or specific VLANs) use the Pi-Hole instance as their DNS server. Pi-Hole handles the basic blocklists and provides that detailed query log we all love for local troubleshooting.
Pi-Hole Forwards to AdGuard Home: Instead of pointing to a public DNS provider like Google or Cloudflare, Pi-Hole’s *only* upstream DNS server is the AdGuard Home instance.
AdGuard Home Handles Encryption: AdGuard Home is configured to use DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) as its upstream. It takes the plain DNS requests from Pi-Hole, encrypts them, and sends them out to the internet. It can also apply a second layer of filtering.

This setup gives you Pi-Hole’s massive blocklist community and logging for internal traffic, plus AdGuard Home’s superior encrypted DNS handling for external traffic. It’s overkill for most, but for a home lab enthusiast or a small business, it provides incredible control and privacy.

Critical Warning: Never, ever, under any circumstances, expose your DNS resolver (port 53) directly to the public internet. This creates an open resolver, which will be abused for DNS amplification attacks, and your ISP will be sending you some very unhappy emails. Keep it firewalled to your local networks only.

Final Verdict: A Quick Comparison Table


Feature	Pi-Hole	AdGuard Home
Core Tech	PHP, lighttpd, dnsmasq	Single Go binary
Encrypted DNS (DoH/DoT)	Requires extra service (e.g., Unbound, cloudflared)	Built-in, native support
Resource Usage	Extremely low	Low (but slightly higher than Pi-Hole)
Community & Support	Massive, mature community	Growing, very active developers
Best For	Stability, simplicity, set-and-forget	Power-users, modern features, ease of deployment

In the end, I told Alex to just pick one, try it for a week, and see if it met his needs. He went with AdGuard Home because he wanted to learn more about DoH. The best tool is the one that solves your problem and, ideally, teaches you something new along the way. Stop the debate and start blocking.