Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home

The blocking is a tie. Both resolve queries, both check the name against subscribed lists, both answer with nothing when it matches, and both use largely the same lists. If ad blocking were the whole job you could flip a coin.

Three things are not a tie: whether encrypted DNS is in the binary or a second daemon, how policy is scoped to a device, and what the last two years of releases did to people who were already running it. Those decide it.

For a new install in 2026, install AdGuard Home. Keep reading for the cases where Pi-hole is the better answer, because there are two real ones.

The rows that separate them#

Ignore the license row and the ops load row, which are close enough to be noise. Look at the port list: AdGuard Home ships with 853 and 3000 in its defaults because it serves DNS-over-TLS itself and runs a first-boot wizard. Pi-hole's port list is 53, 80 and 443 because since v6 it wants the web ports for its own server.

Pi-hole's documented floor is 512 MB RAM and 2 GB of free disk, 4 GB recommended. AdGuard Home publishes no minimum, and the driver for its memory is how many filtering rules you load, not how many queries you serve. Both fit on a Raspberry Pi 3 without drama.

Encrypted upstreams: built in against bolted on#

Your resolver forwards queries somewhere. Over plain UDP 53, your ISP sees every domain you look up, blocking or not.

AdGuard Home handles this in configuration:

dns:
  upstream_dns:
    - https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query
    - tls://one.one.one.one
  bootstrap_dns:
    - 9.9.9.10

Pi-hole handles it by running another program. The standard arrangement is a cloudflared container on the same host, listening on 127.0.0.1:5053, with Pi-hole configured to forward there. It works. It is also a second container to upgrade, a second process that can fail, and when it does fail Pi-hole reports upstream errors rather than falling back to something safe.

The direction that matters more is inbound. AdGuard Home can be a DoH and DoT server, so a phone on mobile data can dial your home resolver over 853 with a real certificate and get your filtering with no VPN. Pi-hole cannot do that at all; you put it behind Headscale or wg-easy and route DNS over the tunnel, which is a fine answer but a different one.

Per-client policy: two different models#

Pi-hole thinks in groups. You define a group, assign clients to it, then attach adlists, allow entries and deny entries to the group. It is a proper many-to-many model and it is the better one when you have twelve devices falling into three policies: kids strict, adults normal, work laptop unfiltered.

AdGuard Home thinks in clients. A client, identified by IP, MAC, a ClientID string or the path in its personal DoH URL, carries its own upstreams, its own blocklists, its own safe-search and parental settings. Custom filtering rules also take a $client modifier, so a single line can carve out one device:

@@||analytics.example.com^$client=192.168.1.50

That is the difference in practice. Pi-hole is better at "these six devices share a policy". AdGuard Home is better at "this one device needs an exception right now", which is the situation you are actually in most evenings.

Which one survives someone saying "the site is broken"#

This is the real operational test, and it is worth being concrete about it.

Someone in the house cannot check out on a shopping site. You have maybe two minutes before they give up and blame the server. The sequence is: find the blocked domain, allow it, confirm.

Both products have a query log you can filter by client and a button that turns a blocked query into an allow rule. Where they diverge is the blast radius of that click. In Pi-hole, an allow entry is global unless it belongs to a group, so a fast fix loosens filtering for everyone, and doing it properly means creating or picking a group and confirming the client is in it. In AdGuard Home you can scope the same fix to the one client with a $client modifier, or just turn protection off for that client for ten minutes from its settings.

The other half of the test is when the resolver itself is the problem. Pi-hole's advantage here is real: it is the reference platform for a decade of tutorials, and the answer to almost any "why is Pi-hole doing this" question already exists somewhere. AdGuard Home's documentation is thinner and its community is smaller.

Verdict on this specific test: AdGuard Home, narrowly, because scoping the fix to one device is one line rather than a group restructure. If your household needs the same fix applied to eight devices at once, Pi-hole's groups win instead.

What the Pi-hole v6 rewrite broke#

Pi-hole v6 landed in February 2025 and rewrote the parts you touch. As of September 2026 the line is FTL v6.7, Web v6.6, Core v6.4.3, and people are still tripping over the transition.

• lighttpd and PHP are gone. pihole-FTL serves the web UI and a documented REST API itself. It binds 80 and 443 and only falls back to 8080 if something already owns 80, which is a fight on any host that also runs a reverse proxy. An in-place upgrade offers to disable lighttpd, and saying yes takes down anything else lighttpd was serving.
• setupVars.conf is no longer read. Everything moved to /etc/pihole/pihole.toml. Older tutorials and Ansible roles still write to the old file, changing nothing at all.
• The static API token is gone. v5 integrations that sent ?auth=<token> all broke. You POST your password to /api/auth, get a session ID, and pass it as X-FTL-SID. For scripts, generate an application password in the UI, which is also the only way to authenticate once TOTP is on.
• Every Docker environment variable was renamed. WEBPASSWORD to FTLCONF_webserver_api_password, DNS1/DNS2 to FTLCONF_dns_upstreams, WEB_PORT to FTLCONF_webserver_port, DNSSEC to FTLCONF_dns_dnssec, and ServerIP removed with no replacement. The container starts happily with the old names, ignores them, and you get a Pi-hole with a random password and default upstreams. No error anywhere.

Also worth knowing before you write Ansible for either: any setting supplied to Pi-hole as an FTLCONF_ variable becomes read-only in the web interface, and AdGuard Home serializes its in-memory state back over AdGuardHome.yaml whenever settings change, so edits made while it is running are lost. Neither is friendly to declarative configuration, in opposite ways.

The uncomfortable truth about both#

Neither of these does what its dashboard implies. They see only the queries that reach them on port 53. Firefox's DNS-over-HTTPS, Chrome's secure DNS, an iPhone with a private DNS profile, a smart TV with 8.8.8.8 compiled in: all invisible, all unfiltered. The pretty percentage on the dashboard is a percentage of what you can see.

Fixing that is a firewall job, not a DNS job. Block outbound 853, redirect or block outbound 53 to anything except your resolver, and block the known DoH endpoint domains. Do that and the numbers start meaning something.

Second uncomfortable truth: whichever you pick becomes a single point of failure for name resolution on your entire network. When it is down, nothing resolves, and the complaint is not "ads are back", it is "the internet is broken". Budget for a second instance or a fallback before you hand this out by DHCP. Uptime Kuma watching a DNS query against it is the cheapest early warning you can set up.

Which one for your situation#

What to do next#

Pick one, then do the part everyone skips: decide what answers DNS when that box is rebooting. DNS for self-hosters covers split horizon, internal names and the secondary-resolver question, which matters more to your household than which of these two you chose. Back up AdGuardHome.yaml or /etc/pihole on a schedule, since both hold your entire configuration in a file small enough to commit to a private git repo, and see Backups that actually restore for making that automatic. The rest of the category is at Networking.