In a single day, my home network logged over 56,000 DNS requests --- and more than 17% of them were ads, trackers, and telemetry phoning home. That number surprised me. So I decided to do something about it.
The solution: a DNS-based network ad-blocker. Unlike browser extensions that only protect one device, a DNS blocker sits between your entire home network and the internet, silently refusing to hand out addresses for anything on its blocklists --- ads, trackers, malware, telemetry --- all stopped before a single packet is even fetched. Every phone, laptop, smart TV, and IoT device on your network gets protected automatically, with nothing installed on any of them.
The two biggest names in this space are Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. Both are free, open source, and widely respected. But which one actually belongs on your home server? I installed both and put them head-to-head across five categories. Here's what I found.
Both tools are remarkably easy to get running. I'm using TrueNAS, so I installed both directly from the App catalog with default settings --- the only change I made was bumping Pi-hole's port number to 31415. You know, because pi. (Someone had to.)
If you're not on TrueNAS, both tools run in Docker or via a simple download and install. The one notable difference: Pi-hole does not run on Windows, while AdGuard Home does. This round is a draw --- both are up and running in minutes.
Pi-hole's dashboard is colorful, information-dense, and genuinely satisfying to look at. The real-time activity charts are interactive and packed with detail. There are also a handful of UI themes --- including an LCARS theme for the truly devoted Star Trek fan. (I washed out of the academy almost immediately.)
AdGuard Home's interface feels more modern and clean, but the activity charts are small, less interactive, and noticeably underwhelming by comparison. Round 2 goes to Pi-hole.
Once installed, both tools need an upstream DNS resolver --- the server they'll forward non-blocked queries to. Pi-hole makes it easy to pick from popular providers like Google, Cloudflare, or Quad9, or enter a custom address. AdGuard Home requires manual entry but ships with a searchable catalog of hundreds of servers to choose from.
Both tools support DNSSEC, which validates that DNS responses haven't been tampered with. A quick note: DNSSEC is not the same as DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS. DNSSEC validates integrity; DoH and DoT encrypt the traffic so your ISP can't see what you're looking up. More on that in Round 5.
When it comes to blocklists, AdGuard Home has a clear edge. Pi-hole lets you add custom blocklist URLs but offers no built-in catalog --- you have to find them yourself. AdGuard Home ships with a curated library of popular lists organized by category: gambling, piracy, malware, and more, all addable with a few clicks. Both tools support local DNS records for friendly naming of devices and services. AdGuard Home takes a slight lead here.
This is where the gap starts to widen. Both tools support per-client controls --- you can apply different blocking rules to different devices. Pi-hole does this through Groups: create a group, assign clients to it by IP or MAC address, then attach blocklists to each group. It works well.
AdGuard Home goes further. Each individual client can have its own upstream DNS server, its own custom rules, and even a schedule for when blocking is active. That's a level of granularity Pi-hole simply doesn't offer.
AdGuard Home also includes built-in parental controls, forced Safe Search across major search engines, and one-click blocking of entire service categories --- social media, gambling, crypto --- without needing a separate blocklist. Round 4 goes to AdGuard Home, and it's not close.
Both tools support DNSSEC. But when it comes to encrypting DNS traffic, they diverge significantly.
AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS out of the box. Your DNS queries are encrypted --- your ISP can't see which sites you're looking up. Pi-hole does not support this natively, though you can get there with additional software and configuration steps.
Worth noting: encrypted DNS doesn't make you invisible. You're just shifting trust from your ISP to your DNS provider (Cloudflare, for example). Your ISP can still see the IP addresses you visit. Add a VPN and you're trusting your VPN provider instead. True anonymity would require something considerably more elaborate --- and considerably less practical.
For most people, Cloudflare or Quad9 with DoH is still a meaningful improvement over whatever your ISP provides by default. Round 5 goes to AdGuard Home for native encryption support.
Running Pi-hole on my network for a day produced 56,000+ DNS queries from 27 devices, with roughly 17% blocked. Notably, Apple and the Brave browser showed up among the most-blocked domains --- a reminder that "privacy-focused" doesn't always mean what you think it does.
With AdGuard Home over a weekend, I saw 77,000+ queries. Initial blocking sat around 7.5%, but after adding a few additional blocklists it jumped to over 18% --- a good illustration of how much the blocklist selection matters. AdGuard Home also revealed that most of my upstream DNS traffic was going to Cloudflare, which was responding nearly twice as fast as Quad9.
Pi-hole and AdGuard Home aren't the only options. Tools like Unbound and Technitium can operate as recursive DNS resolvers --- instead of forwarding queries to a third-party provider, they go directly to authoritative DNS servers. No DNS middleman, more privacy, more complexity. Worth exploring if you want to go deeper.
My pick is AdGuard Home --- but this was not a landslide. Pi-hole is an excellent tool with a richer interface, a massive community, and ad-blocking that's just as effective. If you're already running Pi-hole, there's no compelling reason to switch.
For my setup, AdGuard Home edged it out on three specific things: native DNS-over-HTTPS/DoT support, the built-in blocklist catalog, and more granular per-client controls. Those three factors, taken together, tipped the scales.
One more thing worth addressing: what happens when your server goes down? If your DNS server goes offline, your network can't resolve addresses. Websites stop loading. Streaming services go dark. Drastic consequences.
The fix is a secondary DNS node --- a backup with the same configuration running on a separate physical device. Pi-hole makes this easy with its built-in Teleporter import/export tool. AdGuard Home doesn't have a built-in sync feature, but all settings live in a single file (AdGuardHome.yaml), so you can copy it manually to a second instance.
I still had my Mac Mini running, so I spun up a second AdGuard Home instance in Docker there, copied the YAML file over, and set my router's DHCP server to use that IP as the secondary DNS. Done. Sync tools like AdGuardHome Sync also exist if you want something more automated.
After watching AdGuard Home block nearly 20% of all DNS requests on my network, I genuinely can't imagine running without it. The amount of tracking and telemetry that happens in the background --- across phones, TVs, browsers, and smart home devices --- is eye-opening once you can actually see it.
If you want to see the full walkthrough including the installation, configuration, and real-time stats, check out the video on the Gigabyte Labs YouTube channel. And if you're already running Pi-hole or AdGuard Home (or something else entirely), I'd love to hear which one you chose and why --- drop a comment on the video.