AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to NextDNS. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| AdGuard Home | Pi-hole | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Monitoring, Logs & Errors | Monitoring, Logs & Errors |
| License | GPL-3.0 | EUPL-1.2 |
| GitHub stars | ~24k | ~50k |
| Tech stack | Go | dnsmasq, PHP, Shell |
| Replaces | NextDNS | NextDNS |
Pi-hole has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
AdGuard Home
Network-wide DNS ad-blocking with native DoH/DoT, an alternative to NextDNS.
Pros
- Native DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS without needing an extra proxy, unlike Pi-hole
- More modern statistics dashboard than Pi-hole's
Things to consider
- Smaller third-party blocklist community than Pi-hole's
Pi-hole
Network-wide DNS ad-blocking, an alternative to NextDNS.
Pros
- Protects every device on your network without installing anything on each one
- Very lightweight, runs great on a Raspberry Pi
Things to consider
- Needs to be your primary DNS server to work (requires router configuration)
- No native DNS-over-HTTPS (needs an extra proxy like cloudflared)
Key features
AdGuard Home
- Network-wide ad and tracker blocking at the DNS level
- Native DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS support
- Parental controls and per-client filtering profiles
Pi-hole
- Blocks ads and trackers network-wide for every device
- Web dashboard with real-time DNS query stats
- Updatable, customizable blocklists
Already know which one you prefer?
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