AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole: The DNS Sinkhole Shoot-Out

A DNS sinkhole is the single highest-leverage thing you can add to a home network for the least ongoing effort. Every device that speaks to the internet asks a resolver where to find things first, so a resolver that quietly refuses to answer for known ad and tracker domains cleans up traffic everywhere at once — the smart TV that phones home forty times an hour, the phone apps you never gave permission to, the laptop browsing with an ad blocker the guest declined to install. You point one setting at one box and the whole house benefits. That is why I have run a sinkhole for years and would not go back.

The two names everyone reaches for are Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. They do the same core job and, from a device’s point of view, are indistinguishable — both answer DNS, both drop the bad domains, both give you a dashboard of what’s being blocked. The differences are in the edges, and the edges are where you’ll spend your evenings. I’ve run both as the primary resolver for months at a time. Here’s how the shoot-out actually goes when it’s your household complaining that a site broke.

Why a sinkhole, and why DNS is the right layer

Blocking at DNS is coarse and that’s its strength. You aren’t inspecting page content or fiddling with per-browser extensions; you’re refusing to resolve the hostnames that serve ads and telemetry. It works on devices you can’t install software on, it survives a browser update, and it costs a fraction of a millisecond per lookup. The trade-off is that DNS blocking is all-or-nothing per domain — you can’t block one path on a host while allowing another, and anything served from the same domain as the content you want will sail through. Accepting that limit up front saves a lot of confusion later when a site’s own analytics slip past because they’re hosted on the site’s own domain.

Both tools work by loading blocklists (large text files of domains, maintained by volunteers) into memory and answering “no such host” for anything on the list. The lists are the actual product; the software is the delivery mechanism. Keep that in mind, because a lot of the “which is better” noise online is really about UI taste when the blocking outcome is close to identical.

Setup and first impressions

Both install in a couple of minutes as a container. Here’s the shape of a Compose setup for each, running on a fixed IP so your DHCP server can hand it out as the resolver:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

# Pi-hole
services:
  pihole:
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    container_name: pihole
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "8080:80/tcp"        # web UI
    environment:
      TZ: "Europe/London"
      WEBPASSWORD: "change-me"
      FTLCONF_LOCAL_IPV4: "192.168.1.10"
    volumes:
      - ./etc-pihole:/etc/pihole
      - ./etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d
    restart: unless-stopped

---
# AdGuard Home
services:
  adguard:
    image: adguard/adguardhome:latest
    container_name: adguardhome
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "3000:3000/tcp"      # first-run setup wizard
      - "8081:80/tcp"        # web UI after setup
    volumes:
      - ./work:/opt/adguardhome/work
      - ./conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf
    restart: unless-stopped

The one thing that trips people on both is port 53. If your host already runs a stub resolver — systemd-resolved does by default on most modern distros — it’s sitting on 53 and the container won’t bind. The fix is to free the port before you start:

1
2
3

sudo sed -i 's/#DNSStubListener=yes/DNSStubListener=no/' /etc/systemd/resolved.conf
sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved
sudo ss -ulpn 'sport = :53'   # confirm nothing is still listening

AdGuard Home greets you with a setup wizard on first run, which walks you through picking interfaces and upstreams. Pi-hole drops you at a dashboard and expects you to know where the settings live. If you’ve never touched either, AdGuard’s onboarding is gentler and you’ll have working encrypted upstreams before Pi-hole users have found the right admin page.

The real differences

Encrypted upstreams out of the box. This is AdGuard Home’s biggest structural advantage. It speaks DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS to upstream resolvers natively — you tick a box and your queries to the outside world are encrypted, no extra container required. Pi-hole doesn’t do this itself; the standard approach is to run a separate cloudflared or unbound process alongside it and point Pi-hole at that on localhost. It works well and it’s well documented, and it’s genuinely more moving parts to babysit. If encrypting your outbound DNS matters to you — and it should, because your ISP can read every plaintext lookup — this is a real thumb on AdGuard’s side of the scale. I go deeper on the mechanics in encrypting your DNS without breaking the sinkhole.

Per-client rules. Both let you treat devices differently, and this is where AdGuard pulls ahead for family use. AdGuard’s client model is first-class: you can tag a device by IP or MAC, give it its own blocklists, its own upstreams, its own safe-search enforcement, and a schedule. Pi-hole has group management that achieves similar ends, but the workflow is fiddlier — you build groups, attach lists and clients to groups, and reason about the intersection. For “the kids’ tablets get strict blocking and safe search, my workstation gets nothing”, AdGuard gets you there faster.

Blocklist handling and regex. Pi-hole’s blocklist model is mature and its regex/exact allow-and-deny lists are precise once you learn them. AdGuard has a richer filtering-rule syntax borrowed from browser ad blockers, including element-hiding rules that only matter if you also run their browser extension. For pure DNS blocking the two land in the same place; the built-in default lists differ a little, so raw “domains blocked” counts aren’t comparable between them.

DHCP. Both can act as your DHCP server, which is handy because it lets the resolver learn device names and show you friendly hostnames in the query log instead of bare IPs. I’d hesitate before making either the sole DHCP server for the house — when the box goes down for an upgrade, nobody gets a lease and the complaints arrive in stereo. If your router does DHCP competently, leave it there and just hand out the sinkhole as the DNS option.

The dashboard. Pi-hole’s query log and long-term statistics (via its FTL engine and the database behind it) are excellent for forensics — you can go back weeks and see exactly what a device asked for and when. AdGuard’s query log is clean and fast but historically kept a shorter window by default. If you like staring at graphs and hunting down which app is chatty at 3am, Pi-hole’s data retention gives you more to dig through.

IPv6, the quiet saboteur. If your ISP hands out IPv6, your devices may have a second resolver address you never configured, learned automatically from router advertisements, and that address probably points straight at the ISP’s resolver rather than your sinkhole. The symptom is baffling: blocking works intermittently, or works on one device and not its neighbour, because queries are leaking out over v6. AdGuard Home listens on IPv6 happily and you can advertise it as the v6 resolver; with Pi-hole you’ll want to make sure its container has a routable v6 address and that your router hands it out. If you don’t run v6 at all, disable it cleanly rather than leaving it half-configured, because a half-configured stack is the version that bites.

Living with each: the maintenance reality

Day to day, both are close to zero-maintenance. Blocklists update on a schedule you set. The container gets pulled and restarted when you do your monthly updates. The only recurring human work is the allowlist: sooner or later a blocklist will take out a domain that something legitimate needs, and you’ll be the one who has to notice and fix it.

AdGuard’s allowlisting is a touch friendlier because the query log has a one-click “unblock this” that writes the rule for you. In Pi-hole you copy the domain and add it to the allowlist manually, or use pihole allow example-tracker.net from the shell. Neither is hard; AdGuard just files down one more sharp edge.

Resource use is negligible for either at household scale. On a small always-on box handling a few thousand queries an hour, both sit near idle. If you’re running this on the same machine as everything else — which is a fine idea, they’re tiny — read up first on giving containers their own real IPs so binding port 53 doesn’t collide with other services fighting over the host’s network.

Troubleshooting the things that will actually break

A website is broken and the family blames you. It’s usually the sinkhole, and usually a false positive on a blocklist. Check the query log for that site’s domains around the time it broke, find the blocked one that looks load-bearing (a CDN or an auth domain), and allowlist it. Reproduce before and after so you know you fixed the right thing.

Ads are still getting through. Ads served from the same domain as the content (some large platforms do this deliberately) can’t be sinkholed without breaking the whole site. Don’t chase these; DNS is the wrong layer for them. Also confirm your devices are actually using the sinkhole — a phone with a hard-coded public resolver, or a browser with its own DoH switched on, bypasses you entirely. That last one catches everyone.

Everything stops resolving after a reboot. Almost always the stub-resolver-on-port-53 problem creeping back, or the container losing its static IP. Check ss -ulpn 'sport = :53' on the host and confirm your resolver is the only listener. If you use the sinkhole for DHCP too, a failed restart takes the whole network with it — this is the argument for keeping a second resolver’s address in your DHCP options as a fallback.

Slow first page loads. If lookups feel sluggish, your upstream is the suspect, especially over DoH/DoT where a cold connection costs a round trip. Both tools cache aggressively once warmed. Point them at a fast, nearby upstream and the problem usually disappears.

The one architectural gotcha that applies to both: if you run a split view where internal names resolve differently from public ones, the sinkhole has to sit in the right place in that chain. I’ve written that up separately in split-horizon DNS at home, because getting the ordering wrong produces the maddening “works on my phone, fails on the laptop” class of bug.

The verdict

If you’re starting fresh and want encrypted upstreams and clean per-device rules with the least fuss, install AdGuard Home. The onboarding is kinder, DoH/DoT is built in so you skip a whole extra container, and the client model suits a household with different rules for different people. It’s the one I’d hand to someone who wants the benefit without becoming a DNS hobbyist.

If you love data, want deep long-term query history to go spelunking in, and value a project with a huge community and a decade of accumulated troubleshooting answers for every obscure edge case, Pi-hole rewards the attention. Its documentation and forum are unmatched, and once tuned it’s rock solid.

Honestly, the blocking outcome is close enough that you can pick on temperament and be happy. What matters far more than the choice is that you make it, point your DHCP at the result, and stop letting every device in the house resolve tracker domains unchallenged. The wrong sinkhole beats no sinkhole by a mile.