Mohamed Elashri

Why I Chose AdGuard Home Over Pi-hole

Self-hosting my DNS has been one of those satisfying little victories in the broader journey of self-hosting and network hygiene. It felt like a small but meaningful step toward controlling a bit more of my own digital environment.

I initially tried both Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. They’re both solid projects with passionate communities. But after some trial and error, AdGuard Home just made more sense for how I wanted things to work.

Native DoH Support

For me, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) was non-negotiable. I didn’t want to run cloudflared, dnscrypt-proxy, or patch together extra containers just to get encrypted DNS.

AdGuard Home made this simple. It has native support for DoH, including its own internal HTTPS server. Once I had my reverse proxy set up with a valid TLS cert, my encrypted endpoint was ready to go. Firefox, iOS, and even some CLI tools picked it up immediately. That felt clean.

Unbound Integration That Made Sense

I wanted full recursive DNS, not just filtering on top of an upstream resolver like 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 (I would do anything to avoid 8.8.8.8). So I set up Unbound locally for DNSSEC and QNAME minimization.

AdGuard Home let me point upstream queries to 127.0.0.1:5335 and just worked. I liked that it let Unbound focus on recursion while AdGuard handled filtering and policy.

That division of labor made things easier to reason about, and I didn’t have to worry about any side-channel DNS leakage.

The UI Was Just… Nicer

While testing, I noticed I kept reaching for AdGuard’s web interface more often than Pi-hole’s. It felt more modern, and had a few features that turned out to be quite useful:

None of this was essential, but it made the experience less clunky.

One Binary, No Fuss

This was a big one: AdGuard Home ships as a single binary. I dropped it on my server, ran it under a non-root user, and that was it. No lighttpd, no fragile bash scripts, no five layer Docker setups. Just:

./AdGuardHome

And it launched both the admin UI and the DNS server with TLS. That minimalism reminded me of tools I enjoy using. I reverse proxied it with Nginx, but it didn’t force me to. The native TLS support was there if I wanted to use it directly.

Pi-hole Still Works But AdGuard Fit Better

I don’t think Pi-hole is bad. It does what it promises, and I might reach for it again. But AdGuard Home just made more sense for what I was doing. It spoke DoH natively, handed off recursion cleanly to Unbound, and didn’t feel like something designed a decade ago.

I’ve been running this setup for a while now and it’s been solid. No telemetry, no upstream hijacking, no random redirects when I’m visiting family on questionable ISPs. This isn’t a recommendation, just a note on what worked for me.