Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: How They Differ

Pi-hole and AdGuard Home solve the same problem with the same mechanism. Both are DNS servers that refuse to resolve hostnames on a blocklist, both let you edit those lists, both show you a query log. AdGuard’s own documentation concedes the point: “At this point, AdGuard Home has a lot in common with Pi-Hole. Both block ads and trackers using the so-called ‘DNS sinkholing’ method and both allow customizing what’s blocked.”

That shared foundation means the comparison is not about which one blocks more. It is about what each project has chosen to build into the box, how each is packaged, and what you are signing up to maintain. Everything below is drawn from the two projects’ own documentation.

Where the two are genuinely equivalent

Because the blocking decision happens on a hostname in both products, both inherit exactly the same limits. Neither can separate advertising from content served off the same hostname. Neither sees a request made to a literal IP address. Neither has any effect on a device that ignores the network’s DNS settings. If a switch between them is motivated by ads that survive DNS filtering, it will not help; the reasons are set out in what a Pi-hole DNS sinkhole can and cannot block.

Both also carry an optional DHCP server, both support per-client configuration, and both are free and open source. Hardware requirements are close enough to identical that the sizing advice in Pi-hole hardware requirements applies to either.

The differences that actually change a decision

Capability	Pi-hole	AdGuard Home
DNS sinkhole blocking, custom lists	Yes	Yes
Built-in DHCP server	Yes	Yes
Per-client configuration	Yes	Yes
Encrypted upstream (DoH, DoT, DNSCrypt)	Additional software, e.g. cloudflared	Native
Acts as a DoH / DoT server for clients	Additional software	Native
HTTPS on the admin interface	FTL’s own webserver binds 443	Native
Built-in NTP server	Optional FTL feature	Not offered
Local recursive resolution	Documented Unbound pairing	Documented upstream options
Runs without superuser	Not documented as supported	Documented
Distribution	Installer on supported distros, plus Docker	Single binary, Docker, Snap
Parental controls, adult-domain blocking	Via non-default blocklists	Built in
Forced safe search on search engines	Not a built-in feature	Built in
Configuration surface	pihole.toml, gravity.db, pihole CLI, REST API	YAML config, web UI, REST API

Two rows deserve elaboration, because published comparisons routinely get them wrong.

Encrypted DNS is the clearest split

AdGuard Home ships encrypted transport in both directions: it can talk DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS or DNSCrypt to its upstreams, and it can present itself to clients as a DoH or DoT server. Nothing extra is installed.

Pi-hole treats that as somebody else’s job. The project publishes a guide for pairing it with cloudflared as a local DoH proxy, which works well, but it is a second service to install, monitor and update. If encrypted upstream transport is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, AdGuard Home gets there with fewer moving parts.

Worth separating two things that are often conflated: encrypting your queries to an upstream hides them from your ISP and hands them to whoever operates that resolver instead. Removing the third party altogether is a different design, and Pi-hole documents it as a pairing with Unbound for local recursive resolution. That is arguably the stronger privacy position, and it is not encryption.

AdGuard’s published comparison table describes an older Pi-hole

The AdGuard Home README carries a feature table comparing itself to Pi-hole. It is a useful summary and mostly fair, but it is a vendor comparison written by one of the vendors, and at least one row has aged out.

That table says HTTPS for the admin interface on Pi-hole is “kind of, but you’ll need to manually configure lighttpd.” Pi-hole no longer uses lighttpd. The current prerequisites page documents pihole-FTL binding ports 80 and 443 itself, falling back to 8080 and 8443 when those are occupied, with the port set through the webserver.port option. The webserver is now part of the resolver process.

Similarly, “cross-platform: not natively, only via Docker” understates the position. Pi-hole names Alpine, Armbian, Debian, CentOS Stream, Fedora, Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu as officially supported, with prebuilt FTL binaries for x86_64, armv6, armv7, armv8 and riscv64. That is narrower than a single Go binary that also runs on macOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but it is not Docker-only.

The rows on encrypted DNS, safe search, access control and running without root remain accurate, and they are the substantive ones.

Packaging and operational model

AdGuard Home is one static binary plus a YAML configuration file. Install is a script, a Snap, a container image, or dropping the binary in place. Configuration is one file you can version-control, diff and restore. The documentation covers running it as a non-root user.

Pi-hole is a set of components installed and managed by the pihole command, with state in SQLite databases: subscribed lists and domain rules in /etc/pihole/gravity.db, query history in FTL’s own database. Since v6 the CLI authenticates through the same API the web interface uses, and the post-install documentation notes that adding your user to the pihole group lets those commands authenticate without entering the password each time, a convenience that can be switched off with webserver.api.cli_pw.

That distinction determines which one feels better to operate, and it is largely a matter of taste. A single YAML file is easier to back up and reason about. A database plus a purpose-built CLI is easier to query, script against and manipulate selectively, and pihole exposes genuinely useful verbs: pihole -q to ask which lists contain a domain, pihole tail to watch resolution live, pihole debug to produce a diagnostic bundle. Those tools are the reason the troubleshooting ladder in Pi-hole not blocking ads is as short as it is.

Pi-hole also carries features AdGuard Home does not: an optional NTP server built into FTL, and a large ecosystem of third-party dashboards, exporters and integrations accumulated over a longer life.

Which to choose

Choose AdGuard Home if you want encrypted DNS in or out without bolting on a second service, you want safe search and category-based parental controls without curating blocklists, you want to run on a platform outside Pi-hole’s supported list, you care about running unprivileged, or you simply prefer one binary and one config file.

Choose Pi-hole if you want the larger community and documentation surface, you want a scriptable CLI and SQLite state you can query directly, you plan to pair it with Unbound for local recursion, you want the built-in NTP server, or you are following one of the many well-maintained homelab guides that assume it.

Do not choose either based on blocking effectiveness. Both consume the same public blocklists, and the list you subscribe to matters far more than which engine reads it. Blocklist quality also beats blocklist quantity in both: large aggregated lists overlap heavily and each addition raises the odds of breaking something you need.

Running both, and not running both

They can coexist on one network, and there is one specific way of doing it that is always wrong: listing them as primary and secondary DNS on your clients. Clients are free to pick either, so results become inconsistent and blocking appears to work intermittently. That is a misconfiguration regardless of which two resolvers are involved.

If you want redundancy, run two instances of the same product with the same lists, so either answer is the correct answer. If you want to evaluate the other one, point a single test client at it rather than the whole network.

Finally, the resource question. Neither is heavy, and both are dominated by the same two variables: how many domains are loaded and how much query history is retained. The memory and blocklist sizer is calibrated to Pi-hole’s FTL engine, but the shape of the curve is the same for either, and the buying advice in Pi-hole hardware requirements does not change based on which one you pick.