People online will tell you that picking between AdGuard Home and Pi-hole is some big fork in the road, that you have to get it right or live with regret. I don’t buy it. Both do the same core job in the same way, and the gap between them is smaller than the forums make it sound. This is not a lab benchmark, and no measured results are claimed here. It’s a comparison of how the two differ in setup and day-to-day use, for anyone who maintains this stuff in the cracks between work and the occasional power cut.
The short version: both block trackers and ad domains before they load, and they do it about equally well. Where they split is setup effort, encrypted DNS, the admin screen, and how each one copes with the quirks of an Indian home network. Here’s how they compare on each of those, and which one suits whom.
where they overlap
Both are self-hosted DNS servers that lean on blocklists. They sit on your network, answer DNS for every device, and quietly refuse to resolve anything on their lists. The plumbing underneath is the same, and I already wrote that part up in my DNS-level ad blocking explainer, so I won’t rerun the theory here. Both are free and open source. Both are happy on a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a container on a Proxmox box. And both let you whitelist domains, which I’d push you to actually do for sites you want to keep alive. Blocking the scammy ad networks doesn’t mean you have to starve every small publisher you read.
They also share the same blind spots, which matters more than people expect. Neither one touches YouTube or JioHotstar ads, because those come from the same domains as the video you’re watching. You can’t separate them at DNS. Neither replaces a browser extension like uBlock Origin for page-level cleanup either. So pick on workflow, not on raw blocking power, because on blocking power it’s a wash.
installation: adguard home is the easier one
Pi-hole installs the way it always has, a curl-to-bash script on Debian-family Linux with a little text-mode wizard. AdGuard Home is a single static Go binary instead: you download it, run it, and finish the rest in a browser. It also ships proper builds for Windows, macOS, and even router firmware like OpenWrt, which Pi-hole doesn’t.
curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v
# then open http://YOUR_SERVER_IP:3000 to finish setupOne thing the old-laptop crowd should know. AdGuard Home’s web setup starts on port 3000, then the dashboard wants to move to port 80 unless something already lives there, say a web server you’re running. On a machine that already hosts other services, that means handing AdGuard Home a different port. It’s a five-minute fix, but it trips up first-timers reliably. If you’re starting from bare hardware, my old laptop home server guide gets you to the point where either blocker is a quick install.
Winner on installation: AdGuard Home, but only just, mostly for the single binary and the cross-platform builds.
encrypted dns is where adguard home pulls ahead
Out of the box, AdGuard Home speaks DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS in both directions. Upstream, it encrypts your queries to a resolver you choose, such as Quad9, so ordinary lookups cannot be read or altered on the way. That is a privacy and integrity measure; it is not meant as a way to reach sites blocked under a court or government order, and this guide does not cover that. Downstream, AdGuard Home can also serve encrypted DNS to your own devices, which pairs neatly with Android’s Private DNS setting when you’re out on mobile data.
Pi-hole can do encrypted upstream DNS too, but only with a separate companion service next to it, such as dnscrypt-proxy, or Unbound configured to forward over TLS. (Pi-hole’s older cloudflared method is no longer recommended for new installs: Cloudflare deprecated the proxy-dns feature it relies on in November 2025.) It works. But it’s one more thing to keep updated, and one more thing to debug when DNS falls over at 11 p.m. and the whole house is asking why the internet is broken.
Winner: AdGuard Home, no contest.
living with the interface day to day
Pi-hole’s dashboard is dense and packed with information. Its long-term query database and graphs are flat out better for the “what on earth happened on my network last Tuesday” kind of question. AdGuard Home’s screen is cleaner and friendlier, and two of its features earn their place in day-to-day use:
- Per-client settings. You can block hard on the smart TV, moderately on your own gear, and lightly on your parents’ phones so nothing they depend on ever breaks on them. Pi-hole has group management that can technically do the same, but setting it up feels like filling out a government form in triplicate. AdGuard Home makes it a dropdown.
- Parental controls. Safe search enforcement and adult-content blocking, built in, per client, with no extra lists to go hunting for.
Pi-hole’s answer to all that is its ecosystem, and it’s a real one. The project’s been around since 2015 and the community is enormous. Whatever strange thing breaks on your network, odds are someone hit it back in 2019, posted about it, and got an answer straight from the developers. Most homelab tutorials just assume you’re on Pi-hole. For a beginner who learns by searching, funny enough, that pile of accumulated answers is worth more than any feature checkbox.
performance and resource use
This guide doesn’t publish benchmark numbers for either. On a Pi Zero 2 W, or any tired old laptop, resource use is a non-issue for either of them. Don’t pick on performance, it won’t tell you anything useful.
| Aspect | Pi-hole | AdGuard Home |
|---|---|---|
| Install | Script, Linux only | Single binary, multi-platform |
| Encrypted DNS | Needs companion service | Built in, both directions |
| Per-client rules | Via groups, clunky | Built in, easy |
| Parental controls | Manual lists | Built in |
| Community and tutorials | Massive | Growing |
| Long-term query stats | Excellent | Good |
| Cost | Free | Free |
the india-specific stuff
Whichever one you land on, the genuinely hard part on Indian ISP routers is identical: getting the network to point at your blocker in the first place. JioFiber ONTs usually won’t let you change the DHCP DNS setting at all, so you’ve got two options. Either disable the router’s DHCP and let your blocker hand out the addresses, or drop the ONT into bridge mode behind a router you actually control. Airtel and BSNL fibre routers mostly let you change LAN DNS without a fight. I wrote the exact steps in the Pi-hole setup guide, and they carry over to AdGuard Home unchanged. Only the blocker’s IP is different.
Both blockers also bring the same quiet win on a metered connection: with the ad and tracker domains dead at DNS, those requests never download, so they never count against your data.
a few things i’d tell you up front
- Don’t run both as active DNS at the same time on one DHCP scope. Devices will just use whichever answers first, and your logs turn to mush the moment you need them for debugging.
- Test your UPI and banking apps after every blocklist change. Aggressive lists sometimes swallow a domain that a payment flow quietly needs. Whitelist it and carry on.
- Back up your config. Pi-hole has Teleporter export. AdGuard Home keeps the lot in one YAML file. Either way, recovering after an SD card dies takes a few minutes instead of eating your whole evening.
- Have a fallback for the family. Teach one other person at home how to flip the router’s DNS back to normal if your server falls over while you’re travelling.
FAQ
which one should a beginner pick?
Pi-hole, usually, because when something breaks at midnight, that wall of Pi-hole tutorials and old forum threads is a real safety net to fall back on. AdGuard Home is the better fit once built-in encrypted DNS and per-client rules matter more to you than the size of the community.
can i move from pi-hole to adguard home later?
Easily. Your blocklists pull from mostly the same upstream sources, and your whitelist is a short thing you can re-enter in minutes. Stand the new blocker up on a second device, test it with one phone, then flip the router’s DNS over once you’re happy.
which one blocks more ads?
With the same blocklists loaded, the blocking is basically identical, because the mechanism is identical. The differences you read about online almost always trace back to different default lists, not different engines.
do i still need a browser ad blocker?
For page-level clean-up, yes. A DNS blocker can’t hide the empty boxes ads leave behind or filter inside a page, and a browser extension like uBlock Origin can. It is not a route to YouTube’s ads, though: YouTube states that blocking them violates its Terms of Service, so allow ads there or use YouTube Premium. uBlock Origin on Firefox, plus either of these running at home, is a solid combination, especially now that Manifest V3 has clipped what Chrome extensions are allowed to do.
So that’s the comparison. You can’t really pick wrong here. The worst thing that happens is mild envy of the other tool’s dashboard. Go AdGuard Home if you want encrypted DNS and per-device control out of the box, and go Pi-hole if you want the biggest community at your back.
Update history: withdrew the earlier test note and the three-month test claims, which had no retained evidence behind them; updated Pi-hole’s encrypted-upstream options; added sources.
Sources
- AdGuard Home wiki — upstream configuration reference for the AdGuard side of this comparison.
- Pi-hole documentation — upstream reference for the Pi-hole side.
- AdGuard Home README — the install command used above.
- Pi-hole cloudflared guide — Pi-hole’s November 2025 deprecation warning for the cloudflared proxy-dns method.