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.

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!

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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.

There’s a third party tool for AdGuard which allows syncing multiple instances. Very nice because if you want something to be redundant in your home setup, it’s DNS. This adds the ability to sync configured rulesets and custom DNS entries.

EDIT: There seems to be a similar tool for Pi-hole as well.

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 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.

I used to do all this, but then I gave up and started paying for NextDNS. It’s like having your own Piholes in the cloud. It’s like £18/year and is way more reliable than self hosting, especially for something as crucial as DNS for your home. It also has excellent parental controls if you need that, multiple profiles, good logging and analytics and a decent looking privacy policy.

Sure, it’s not as fun as self-hosting but it’s better then getting shouted at every time someone’s app stops working because of some glitch in your setup.

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

Does AdGuard Home have proper IPv6 support meanwhile? I remember the lack thereof made me switch back to pi-hole a few years ago.