Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which One Should You Run?

Network-wide ad blocking is one of the first things people set up in a home lab, and it might be the most immediately satisfying. Ads disappear from every device on your network — phones, TVs, smart devices — without installing anything on them. The two tools that dominate this space are Pi-hole and AdGuard Home.

They both do the same thing at the core. The differences are in setup, interface, and a few features around the edges. Here’s what the community has landed on.

How They Work

Both run as local DNS servers. When a device on your network tries to resolve ads.tracking-company.com, the request hits your Pi-hole or AdGuard first. If it matches a blocklist, it returns nothing. The ad never loads. The tracker never fires.

No configuration needed on client devices — point your router’s DNS at the local IP and every device on the network is covered.

Pi-hole

Around since 2014. Bigger community, more battle scars, more documented edge cases.

Strong points:

  • Stable. Rarely breaks. If it worked yesterday, it works today.
  • Massive community — nearly any problem you hit has been solved already
  • Pairs well with Unbound for full recursive DNS (no upstream provider sees your queries)

Rough edges:

  • The UI looks like it was designed in 2016, because it was
  • Advanced config requires CLI comfort
  • DNS-over-HTTPS needs extra setup (dnscrypt-proxy or similar)
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Five minutes and it’s running.

AdGuard Home

Newer, catching up fast, and winning over people who care about interface quality.

Strong points:

  • Noticeably better UI — stats are easier to read, per-client breakdowns are cleaner
  • DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS built in, no extra components
  • Per-device parental controls
  • Single binary, easy to update

Rough edges:

  • Smaller community, less documentation for edge cases
  • Some things Pi-hole has solved through years of iteration aren’t as polished
curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

Web UI on port 3000, then migrates to 80/443 after setup.

What People Actually End Up Running

The pattern in r/homelab and r/selfhosted: people start with Pi-hole because it’s more well-known, then a significant chunk switch to AdGuard Home once they see the interface. The blocking quality is effectively identical — the difference is user experience.

The privacy-maximalist crowd (common in r/selfhosted) tends toward Pi-hole + Unbound — full recursive DNS, no upstream provider sees your queries at all. More setup, more control.

People who want something their partner can also manage tend toward AdGuard Home. The UI is easier to hand off to someone who doesn’t want to SSH into things.

Hardware

Either one runs on basically anything alongside other services. If you want a dedicated low-power host:

  • Raspberry Pi 5 → — 4GB is more than enough for DNS. If you have a Pi gathering dust, put it to work.
  • Beelink S12 Pro → — Runs DNS alongside five other things without noticing.

Docker works well for both:

# AdGuard Home
docker run -d --name adguardhome \
  -p 53:53/tcp -p 53:53/udp \
  -p 3000:3000/tcp \
  adguard/adguardhome

# Pi-hole
docker run -d --name pihole \
  -p 53:53/tcp -p 53:53/udp \
  -p 80:80/tcp \
  -e TZ="America/Los_Angeles" \
  pihole/pihole

The Short Answer

Setting up fresh? Start with AdGuard Home. Better interface, DoH built in, less to configure.

Already running Pi-hole and it works? No reason to switch. The blocking is the same.

Whichever you pick, run a second instance for redundancy. DNS going down takes your entire network with it, and it will happen at the worst possible time. Everyone learns this once.

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