AdGuard Home Overtakes Pi-hole as the Default Self-Hosted DNS Blocker in 2026

February 2025, Pi-hole shipped v6 — the biggest rework in the project’s history. June 2026, AdGuard Home released 0.107.77, patching a path traversal CVE within two weeks of disclosure. Both projects are in excellent shape. Yet by April 2026, the question has shifted from three years ago: for a new deployment, AdGuard Home is the better choice, and the margin isn’t a coin flip. Pi-hole has its niches — recursive resolving with unbound, long-term analytics, the community — but it can no longer claim the title of default standard.

The principle is identical on both sides: you run a DNS server on your network, set it as your resolver, and every query to an ad, tracker, or malware domain gets back an empty response. The ad asset never loads, and this covers every device — smartphones, smart TVs, game consoles, IoT cameras — without installing a single extension anywhere. One machine, one configuration point, and your entire network runs cleaner.

Pi-hole v6 — a decade of rust consolidated into one binary

Pi-hole was born in 2014 on a Raspberry Pi with a simple promise: turn a tiny computer into a black hole for ads. Twelve years later, it carries 50,000 GitHub stars, a community that has answered every imaginable question, and reliability proven across millions of installations. Version v6, released in February 2025, is an architectural break: the FTL engine (a C daemon built on dnsmasq) now embeds the web UI and a proper REST API directly in the binary. Lighttpd and PHP are gone from the stack. Configuration moved to /etc/pihole/pihole.toml. In plain terms, Pi-hole v6 did what AdGuard Home has done since day one: ship as a single binary.

Where Pi-hole still shines is its ecosystem. FTL keeps a SQLite database with 365 days of query retention by default — a goldmine if you live in Grafana. The Home Assistant integrations, PADD status screens, third-party mobile apps, and subreddit threads where every error message already has an answer represent twelve years of capitalized troubleshooting. The canonical pairing with unbound — a local recursive resolver that queries root servers directly, never touching a third party — remains the strongest DNS privacy configuration available. No provider, not even Quad9 or Cloudflare, sees your full query stream.

The limitations are structural. Pi-hole speaks plain DNS on port 53, full stop. It cannot answer clients over DoH, DoT, or DoQ. If you want encrypted upstream, you add cloudflared (DoH proxy) or unbound alongside — a second service to deploy, monitor, and update. Client filtering relies on a group system (introduced in v5, carried into v6) that handles straightforward cases — a strict list for the kids’ VLAN, a permissive one for your homelab — but offers no SafeSearch enforcement, no scheduled service blocking, and no parental control presets. All of that gets hand-rolled with regex, cron jobs, and third-party lists.

AdGuard Home — native encrypted DNS changes the game

AdGuard Home was born in 2018 under AdGuard, the company known for its ad blockers. Written in Go and distributed as a single binary with zero dependencies, it installs in ten minutes on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, or OpenWrt — Pi-hole requires Linux or Docker, no exceptions. Its decisive advantage in 2026: native encrypted DNS, in both directions.

AdGuard Home speaks DoH, DoT, and DoQ outbound without any external component. The default upstream is Quad9 over DoH (https://dns10.quad9.net/dns-query) — your queries leave the house encrypted before you’ve touched anything. Better still, it can act as an encrypted DNS server: give it a TLS certificate and your devices query it over DoH, DoT, or DoQ from outside your network. The killer test: take an Android phone, open Private DNS settings, point it at your AdGuard Home instance. It works. With Pi-hole it simply cannot, because nothing is listening on port 853. If encrypted client-side DNS is on your wishlist, the comparison is already over.

Per-client control is the other massive differentiator. AdGuard Home treats clients as first-class objects: you define a client by IP, CIDR range, MAC address, or ClientID (a hostname-embedded identifier for DoT/DoQ connections that follows the device even off your LAN), then assign it its own upstream resolvers, blocklists, forced SafeSearch on Google, YouTube, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, the adult content filter, and service blocking with schedules. Blocking TikTok and YouTube on the kids’ tablet on school nights in five clicks, without a line of regex, is AdGuard Home’s kept promise.

The interface is noticeably more modern: cleaner navigation, responsive dashboard, setup wizard that explains every option. The filtering syntax covers the full AdGuard rule format with modifiers like $client, $dnstype, $dnsrewrite, and $important, letting a single rule do what Pi-hole emulates with a regex, a local DNS record, and a cron job.

The real gap: encrypted DNS is now the baseline

In 2026, encrypted DNS is no longer a power-user luxury. Android has enforced Private DNS (DoT) by default for several versions. Firefox and Chrome enable DoH automatically. ISPs monetize DNS logs — Verizon and T-Mobile have been caught selling browsing data derived from DNS queries, and the practice isn’t confined to the United States. A plain Pi-hole blocks ads on your network but leaves your ISP reading every domain you query upstream. Adding cloudflared or unbound fixes this, and the setup is well-documented — budget twenty minutes of extra work. But for a new deployment, getting encrypted DNS without that step is a meaningful argument.

Both tools share the same fundamental limit: neither blocks YouTube, Twitch, or Facebook in-app ads. Those ads are served from the same domains as the content, so DNS blocking cannot separate them. What you block are third-party ad domains, trackers, telemetry, and malware domains. Anyone promising more is selling something.

On the maintenance front, both projects are in excellent health in 2026. Pi-hole updates with pihole -up and benefits from twelve years of community answers. AdGuard Home is backed by AdGuard the company and delivers patches within days: v0.107.75 patched a DoQ/DoH vulnerability in May 2026, and v0.107.77 fixed a path traversal (CVE-2026-XXXXX) in June 2026. Take that as evidence of an actively maintained project — and as a reminder to keep whichever one you run updated, since your DNS server sees everything.

Backup is trivial on both sides: Teleporter exports the entire Pi-hole configuration in one archive, and AdGuardHome.yaml contains AdGuard Home’s entire configuration — a single file you can version in Git. Running either in Docker makes rebuilds a non-event.

Verdict

The question isn’t “which is better in absolute terms” — it’s “what’s your starting point.”

You’re deploying fresh today, especially for a family network with kids. Install AdGuard Home. Native encrypted DNS in both directions, per-client control with SafeSearch, scheduled service blocking, and built-in parental controls are features you will actually use — and Pi-hole requires sidecar services and hand-written regex to approximate them. The single binary runs on practically any machine, and the setup wizard holds your hand through every option. The verdict from HomelabCompass and Selfhostr converges: for a new deployment in 2026, AdGuard Home is the better tool, and it’s not close.

You already run Pi-hole v5/v6 with unbound and everything works. Stay on Pi-hole. Migrating a working resolver for features you won’t use makes no sense. The Pi-hole + unbound pairing remains the strongest DNS privacy configuration going — no third party sees your full query stream, not even Quad9. Pi-hole v6 modernized the stack under you for free.

You want a year of query history and Grafana dashboards. Pi-hole. FTL’s long-term database and the ecosystem of dashboards, Home Assistant integrations, and PADD screens have no equivalent on the AdGuard Home side.

Your “server” is a NAS, a Windows box, or an OpenWrt router. AdGuard Home. Pi-hole requires Linux or Docker, no exceptions. AdGuard Home runs natively on Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, and OpenWrt.

Network-wide DNS blocking is one of the highest-value changes you can make to your home network. It reduces tracking on devices where you can’t install extensions, cuts some traffic by blocking ad assets before they load, and gives you visibility into what your IoT devices are actually querying. Both tools are free, open source, and turn a Raspberry Pi or a cheap VM into a shield for every device you own. The hard part isn’t choosing between Pi-hole and AdGuard Home — it’s taking the first step.

References

• Pi-hole — Network-wide ad blocking
• Pi-hole v6 Release Notes — February 2025
• Pi-hole Documentation
• AdGuard Home — Official Site
• AdGuard Home GitHub — AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome
• AdGuard Home v0.107.77 Release Notes — June 2026
• Selfhostr — Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home 2026
• HomelabCompass — Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home (2026)
• SaaSCompared — Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home in 2026
• Noted.lol — Block Everything You Hate Online with AdGuard Home
• Pi-hole + unbound — Official Guide