Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which Should You Run in 2026?

If you've already read our Pi-hole guide and you're wondering whether the AdGuard alternative is the smarter choice in 2026, this post is for you. We'll compare them on the five things that actually matter: setup difficulty, blocklist quality, the admin UI, performance under real household load, and hardware requirements. By the end you'll know which one to install on Saturday morning - and you can be browsing ad-free by Saturday lunchtime.

Both projects are DNS sinkholes. They sit between every device on your network and the wider internet, intercepting the requests your devices make to resolve domain names. When a device asks for doubleclick.net or googlesyndication.com, the sinkhole returns a fake address that goes nowhere - the ad never loads, the tracker never sees you. Anything else gets forwarded to a real upstream DNS server (Cloudflare, Quad9, or whoever you choose) and works normally.

Pi-hole has been around since 2015. It's an open-source project written largely in C and PHP, originally designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a popular low-cost single-board computer often used as a network appliance,. It's the more conservative of the two - does one thing, leans on companion projects (Unbound for recursive DNS, Gravity-Sync for high availability) when you need more, and has a vast community and ten years of accumulated wisdom. The official source is at github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.

AdGuard Home is the open-source, self-hosted sibling of the AdGuard browser extension and apps, first released in 2018. It's written in Go, ships as a single binary, and bundles features that are bolt-on extras for Pi-hole - encrypted DNS protocols, per-client filtering rules, a parental-controls module with safe-search enforcement, and a built-in DHCP server. The source is at github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome.

Both can be installed in under 30 minutes on a Raspberry Pi running a fresh OS. The actual experience differs in a few small but meaningful ways.

Pi-hole uses an interactive shell installer kicked off with a single curl command (curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash). The installer asks about a dozen questions - network interface, upstream DNS provider, blocklists, whether to install the web UI, log behaviour, privacy mode. The defaults are sensible, and once it's done it prints the dashboard URL and a randomly-generated admin password. Network reconfiguration (pointing your router's DNS at the Pi-hole) is a separate, manual step you do in your router's admin panel.

AdGuard Home also installs with a one-liner (the official method is curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v), but the configuration happens in the web UI rather than the shell. You point a browser at port 3000, click through a setup wizard for upstream DNS, the admin account, and which interface to listen on, and you're done. For people who prefer GUIs over shell prompts, this feels noticeably friendlier.

Verdict on setup: AdGuard Home is slightly easier for beginners because the configuration happens in a familiar browser UI, and encrypted DNS works out of the box. Pi-hole is well within reach for anyone comfortable answering a dozen yes/no shell prompts, and the documentation is exceptional. Neither is meaningfully hard.

This is where most people expect a big difference and find a small one. Both projects ship with a default blocklist that does roughly 80% of the work. Both let you add more lists with a paste of a URL. Both consume the same community-maintained sources.

Pi-hole's default is StevenBlack's Unified Hosts, an aggregator that combines several upstream lists into about 130,000 ad and tracker domains. It's well-tuned, low on false positives, and updated daily. The full list is published openly at github.com/StevenBlack/hosts.

AdGuard Home's defaults are AdGuard's own DNS filter (50,000 rules), the AdAway list (12,000 rules), and a few smaller lists. The total is a similar order of magnitude to Pi-hole's default. AdGuard's curated list leans slightly more aggressive on tracker domains and slightly less aggressive on edge-case ad CDNs - in practice you'll see a percentage point or two of difference in block rate, not a meaningful gap.

The crucial point: both projects can use the same blocklists. The hosts files maintained by Steven Black, OISD, hagezi, and the rest of the community work in either tool. If you want to run identical blocklists on both, you can - and for many users, the right answer is to add OISD's list (oisd.nl) to whichever tool they pick, because it's the most thoughtfully curated single source.

Verdict on blocklists: functionally a draw. Both block what you want them to block; the differences are in rule-syntax breadth, not in the size or quality of the default coverage. If you swap from one to the other after a year, you almost certainly won't notice your ad-block experience changing.

This is where the two projects feel most different - and where personal taste matters most. We can describe both honestly; pick whichever sounds nicer to you.

Pi-hole's dashboard is the older of the two, and it shows. The layout is a classic admin-panel grid: total queries today, total blocked, percentage blocked, top domains, top clients, query log. It's information-dense and a touch dated visually, but every piece of data you'd want is one or two clicks from the front page. The query log is particularly good - filtering by client, domain, or status (blocked/allowed/forwarded) is fast and intuitive.

AdGuard Home's dashboard is more modern: more whitespace, larger charts, a cleaner mobile experience, and prominent toggles for parental controls and safe-search settings. The query log filters are a touch less granular than Pi-hole's, but the per-client view is better - at a glance you can see exactly which device is hammering which domains, and edit that device's blocklist or schedule from the same screen.

Verdict on UI: AdGuard Home's UI is the better-looking of the two and easier on a phone. Pi-hole's UI is more powerful for forensic query investigation. Most people will prefer AdGuard's; users who spend a lot of time digging into device-level network behaviour will prefer Pi-hole's.

DNS resolution is a remarkably cheap workload, and both projects are fast. For a typical household of 20–30 devices generating around 20,000–60,000 DNS queries a day, neither will stress modern hardware in any meaningful way. The differences only matter at the margins.

Pi-hole, written largely in C, has an extremely small memory footprint - typically 50–80MB of RAM when idle, climbing to maybe 150MB under load. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (£18) is enough hardware for a household, and a Pi 4 (2GB) is overkill. CPU usage barely registers on the dashboard.

AdGuard Home, written in Go, has a slightly heavier resting footprint - typically 80–150MB of RAM, climbing to 250–400MB on busy networks with verbose query logging. That's still tiny by any modern standard. CPU usage is also minimal, though Go's garbage collector means you'll see slightly more frequent micro-spikes on a graph than you would with Pi-hole.

Per-query latency is well under a millisecond on either project - orders of magnitude faster than the upstream DNS round-trip to Cloudflare or Quad9, which is what actually dominates total resolution time. Neither will be a noticeable bottleneck on any normal network.

Verdict on performance: Pi-hole is the lighter project by a small margin. AdGuard Home is still extremely cheap to run. Neither will stress hardware that costs less than £50.

Both projects run on essentially the same hardware. If you're starting from scratch, the cheapest viable build is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for around £18 plus a power supply, SD card, and Ethernet adapter - total spend somewhere between £35 and £45. A Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) gives you more headroom for around £55–£65 all-in, and is the most common choice.

If you already have something always-on - a NAS, an Unraid box, a Mini PC running Proxmox, even an old laptop with a dead battery plugged in permanently - installing either project in Docker is the simplest path. Five-line docker run command, mount a config volume, point your router at the host IP, done. The official Docker images are kept current.

Verdict on hardware: identical for practical purposes. If you can run one, you can run the other on the same Pi. If you've already built a Raspberry Pi home server for other purposes, either project is a five-minute add-on.

On the standard ad-blocking job, the two projects are close. The gap widens if you want anything beyond ad-blocking from the same box.

Encrypted DNS is the headline difference. AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), DNS-over-TLS (DoT), DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ), and DNSCrypt as both an inbound listener (devices can connect to it over encrypted DNS from outside your house) and as upstream resolution (it can talk to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 over DoH instead of plain DNS). Pi-hole does not support encrypted DNS natively - you achieve the same outcome by running cloudflared or unbound-with-DoT as a separate companion service. It works, but it's an extra moving part.

DHCP is another area where AdGuard Home edges ahead. Both can act as your network's DHCP server (replacing your router), but AdGuard's implementation is configured entirely in the web UI, while Pi-hole's is functional but a touch more technical to enable. Most people leave DHCP to the router and just point its DNS field at the ad-blocker, which works equally well on either.

Parental controls and safe search are first-class citizens in AdGuard Home - toggle a switch and Google, Bing and YouTube are forced into safe-search mode for whichever clients you select. Pi-hole achieves the same outcome by adding category blocklists (OISD has good ones), but it's a manual rather than a bundled feature.

Both projects are excellent. The question is which trade-offs match your situation. Here are five short cases that cover most readers:

Yes - and a small but devoted slice of the home-network community does. Two common patterns:

Pattern 1: Pi-hole behind AdGuard Home (or vice-versa). AdGuard Home handles encrypted DNS to the upstream, hands queries to Pi-hole, which does the blocking and forwards anything legitimate. You get encrypted DNS and Pi-hole's query log. The downside is two services to maintain and a slightly more confusing query log when you're debugging what blocked what.

Pattern 2: Two ad-blockers in parallel for redundancy. Run a Pi-hole and an AdGuard Home as primary and secondary DNS in your router. If one dies, DNS keeps working. The downside, repeated from earlier: most consumer routers don't actually fail over cleanly between primary and secondary DNS - they often randomise - so you'll see different blocking behaviour on different queries. Better is to run two of the same project (two Pi-holes synchronised with Gravity-Sync, or two AdGuard Homes).

If we had to give a one-line answer: for most people in 2026, AdGuard Home is the slightly better choice for a first DNS-level ad-blocker - encrypted DNS comes free, the UI is gentler, and per-client controls are first-class. But the gap is small, and for tinkerers, Home Assistant, the open-source smart home automation platform, users, or anyone who already has a Raspberry Pi running, Pi-hole's lighter footprint and broader ecosystem still make it a fantastic pick.

Both will block the ads. Both will protect every device on your network. Both will run for years on £55 of hardware in a corner of your living room. The wrong choice is choosing neither - choose the one whose UI screenshots make you slightly happier, install it this weekend, and stop seeing tracker pixels on every device you own.