Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Picking a Self-Hosted DNS Ad Blocker for Your Homelab
Browser extensions block ads on the device they’re installed on. A phone that isn’t running one, a smart TV, a game console, a guest’s laptop on your Wi-Fi, none of that gets covered. Network-level DNS blocking fixes that by sitting between every device on your network and the internet, and refusing to resolve requests to known ad and tracker domains before they ever load. It’s one of the easiest wins in self-hosting: low resource cost, immediate and visible results, and it protects every device on the network without touching a single one of them individually. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home are the two dominant tools for doing this yourself, and picking between them comes down to a handful of real differences, not just branding. ...