Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which Should You Self-Host?

Two DNS sinkholes, one job

Both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home do the same core thing: they sit on your network as a DNS server, check every domain a device asks for against a blocklist, and refuse to resolve the ones that serve ads or trackers. No browser extension needed. Every device on the network gets the blocking, including phones, smart TVs, and apps that ignore ad blockers.

They are both free and open source, both run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi, and both have years of real-world use behind them. The choice comes down to a handful of concrete differences. This comparison is based on Pi-hole v6.4.3 (released 2026-07-06) and AdGuard Home v0.107.79 (released 2026-08-18), checked against their GitHub repositories on 2026-09-23.

What each one actually is

Community at a glance

Pi-hole has 61,016 GitHub stars to AdGuard Home's 37,028 (GitHub API, 2026-09-23), a gap that mostly reflects Pi-hole's 2014 head start. Pi-hole's subreddit has over 150,000 members (per readthemanual.co.uk, 2026). That community size means more forum threads, more YouTube walkthroughs, and more third-party integrations written by hobbyists over the years.

Setup and first impressions

Both install in minutes, either with a one-line script or a Docker container, and both work on a Raspberry Pi or any always-on Linux box.

Pi-hole installer (one-liner):

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

A short set of interactive prompts follows: which DNS upstream to use, which interface to listen on, and whether to install the dashboard. Since v6 the dashboard is served by a web server built into the FTL binary itself, so there is no lighttpd or PHP to maintain, and the redesigned UI offers Basic and Expert modes.

AdGuard Home installer (tarball, ARM64 example):

wget https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/releases/latest/download/AdGuardHome_linux_arm64.tar.gz
tar -xzf AdGuardHome_linux_arm64.tar.gz
cd AdGuardHome && sudo ./AdGuardHome -s install

A setup wizard then walks you through picking listening ports and an admin login before dropping you into a dashboard that looks noticeably modern, with clearer graphs and a cleaner filtering-rules editor.

If you prefer Docker, both projects maintain official images:

• Pi-hole: pihole/pihole (maintained in the pi-hole/docker-pi-hole repo)
• AdGuard Home: adguard/adguardhome

A minimal Pi-hole v6 Docker Compose:

services:
  pihole:
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    container_name: pihole
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: "America/New_York"
      FTLCONF_webserver_api_password: "changeme"
    volumes:
      - ./etc-pihole:/etc/pihole
    restart: unless-stopped

A minimal AdGuard Home Docker Compose:

services:
  adguardhome:
    image: adguard/adguardhome:latest
    container_name: adguardhome
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "3000:3000/tcp"
    volumes:
      - ./adguard-work:/opt/adguardhome/work
      - ./adguard-conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf
    restart: unless-stopped

If you are a first-time self-hoster, AdGuard Home's setup wizard is the gentler on-ramp. If you are comfortable with a terminal, either installer is equally fast.

Encrypted DNS: the clearest technical gap

This is the biggest functional difference between the two tools.

AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), DNS-over-TLS (DoT), DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ), and DNSCrypt natively. It can both query encrypted upstream resolvers (Cloudflare, Quad9, and others, specified via DNS Stamps) and act as its own DoH/DoT/DoQ/DNSCrypt server for your local devices. All of this is configured from the settings page with no extra software.

Pi-hole has no native DoH, DoT, DoQ, or DNSCrypt support. To send encrypted queries upstream, you pair it with a separate tool: cloudflared (Cloudflare's DoH proxy) or unbound (a full recursive resolver). This is a well-documented, common setup, but it means an extra process to install, configure, and keep running.

If encrypted upstream DNS matters to you and you do not want a second service to manage, that is a clear reason to choose AdGuard Home.

AdGuard's own comparison table

AdGuard Home's GitHub README includes an official feature comparison. It is their own marketing table (every row favors AdGuard Home where there is a difference), so treat it as a starting point, not a neutral audit. One row also understates Pi-hole v6's improvements: the "HTTPS for admin interface" row implies lighttpd configuration is still required, which is no longer true in v6 (the built-in web server handles HTTPS natively).

Source: AdGuard Home GitHub README (checked 2026-09-23). Rows reflect AdGuard's framing.

Full feature matrix

Source: GitHub API and project READMEs, checked 2026-09-23.

Blocklists and filtering

Pi-hole's blocklist ecosystem is larger because it has been around longer. Community-maintained lists (like the ones on Firebog) are written with Pi-hole's domain-list format in mind, and most tutorials assume Pi-hole. Regex filtering and per-client group rules are both supported.

AdGuard Home uses adblock-style rule syntax (the same format as the AdGuard browser extension), which lets it import mature, actively updated filter lists. The syntax is more powerful for fine-grained blocking but has a steeper learning curve if you have never used AdGuard products before.

One AdGuard Home feature worth naming explicitly: it ships with a built-in "block by service" toggle list covering over 200 named apps and services (TikTok, Discord, Facebook Messenger, etc.) that you can enable or disable per client. Pi-hole has no equivalent; you would add the relevant domains to a custom blocklist manually.

Both support DHCP server functionality if you want them to also hand out IP addresses on your network, though most home labs leave DHCP on the router.

Resource use: real numbers

Vague "you won't need more than a gig of RAM" framing misses the real comparison point. The numbers below come from raspberry.tips testing on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB), published 2026, against a home network with 18 devices. CPU stayed under 2% idle for both tools.

The practical implication: adding Unbound alongside Pi-hole for encrypted DNS costs roughly 45 MB of extra RAM compared to Pi-hole standalone. AdGuard Home's native encrypted DNS adds around 10 MB over its standalone baseline. On a Pi 4 or any machine with 1 GB or more of RAM, neither number matters much. On a Pi Zero 2 W (512 MB) running multiple services, those differences are real.

Both tools perform comparably under roughly 100,000 DNS queries per day, per readthemanual.co.uk's 2026 testing. Above that threshold, AdGuard Home's native Go implementation tends to show an edge, but most home networks never approach that query volume.

Extra features

AdGuard Home ships with built-in parental controls (safe search enforcement, adult content category blocking) and per-client access schedules without needing a plugin or extra blocklist. Pi-hole can approximate some of this with group management and third-party blocklists, but it is not as turnkey.

Pi-hole has a larger plugin and integration ecosystem for home-lab dashboards (Homepage, Homarr, Uptime Kuma widgets, Grafana exporters) because of its head start. If your setup already leans on Pi-hole-specific integrations, that matters.

Redundancy tip

Running a single DNS server means your entire network loses name resolution if that server goes down or if you update it and break something. A simple resilience pattern: run one tool as the primary DNS and the second (or any public resolver) as the fallback. Most routers let you set two DNS server addresses. This is not an either/or situation: both tools can coexist on your network with different roles.

Which one should you pick

• Pick AdGuard Home if you want encrypted DNS without adding a second tool, you want built-in parental controls for a household with kids, or you prefer a more modern dashboard and lower RAM footprint.
• Pick Pi-hole if you value the largest blocklist community, want the most tutorials and third-party integrations, or you are already running other Pi-hole-adjacent tools in your setup.
• Either one is a fine first self-hosted service. Neither requires powerful hardware, both are GPL-3.0 and free, and you can migrate blocklists between them later if you change your mind.

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