AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole: I Ran Both for 3 Months, Here’s My Verdict

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. For three months this year I ran both at the same time in my Patna flat, Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi 4 and AdGuard Home on an old ThinkPad I use as a home server, and the gap between them is smaller than the forums make it sound. Half the household’s devices pointed at one, half at the other. Every few weeks I swapped the halves so neither tool got the easy devices and a free pass. This was never a lab benchmark. I just wanted to know which one I’d keep, given that I maintain 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 what three months taught me, and which one is still running.

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 Hotstar 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. It went fine on the Pi. It’s gone fine every single time I’ve done it, honestly. 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 setup

One 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. My ThinkPad already hosts a few services, so port 80 was taken and I had to hand 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 like Quad9, so your ISP can’t casually read or rewrite what you’re asking for. In India that’s not paranoia, it’s the actual mechanism. ISP-level DNS interference is how a lot of site blocks get implemented here, and resolvers on Jio and Airtel will happily NXDOMAIN or redirect a blocked domain on you. 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 if you bolt on a separate companion service next to it, cloudflared or unbound. It works. I ran it that way for years, no complaints really. 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 quietly became things I used every day:

• Per-client settings. I block hard on the smart TV, moderately on my own gear, and lightly on my 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

I’m not going to pretend I have lab-grade numbers. But after three months of just watching: both answered cached queries in roughly a millisecond on the LAN, both idled under 100 MB of RAM with my modest blocklists, and neither one ever made browsing feel sluggish on a 100 Mbps Airtel fibre line. On a Pi Zero 2 W, or any tired old laptop, resource use is a non-issue for either of them. Think of it like leaving a phone charger plugged in. It draws so little you stop noticing. Don’t pick on performance, it won’t tell you anything useful.

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 handed me the same quiet win on capped data. With the ad and tracker domains dead at DNS, pages on ad-heavy Indian sites loaded visibly lighter, like clearing the junk drawer in the kitchen so you can finally find the scissors, and the family’s daily Jio data stretched further. On both, I keep the same short whitelist of publishers whose ads I let through on purpose. The tools turn supporting a good site into a two-click decision, and that’s the posture I think makes sense: kill the surveillance and the scam networks, fund the people doing honest work.

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. It’s the household equivalent of showing someone where the fuse box is.

FAQ

so which one did i keep?

AdGuard Home, mostly for the built-in encrypted DNS and the per-client rules. That said, I still point most beginners at Pi-hole, 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.

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?

Yes. A DNS blocker can’t touch same-domain ads like YouTube’s, and it can’t tidy up the empty boxes ads leave behind on the page. uBlock Origin on Firefox, plus either of these running at home, is the combination I use, especially now that Manifest V3 has clipped what Chrome extensions are allowed to do.

So that’s the verdict after three months of running both. 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, go Pi-hole if you want the biggest community at your back, and spend the time you saved curating a whitelist of sites worth supporting.