I use Pi-Hole and works great. I’ve heard about AdGuard and seems the same thing as PiHole, but you have to install an app/extension. Everyone in this community recommend NextDNS. Whats the difference between them?

  • Strange we’ve had differing experiences. I’ve only been using Adguard for a couple of months, but the reason I left Pihol was because of its instability! Or at least, the database would constantly get chowned elsewhere when running in docker so I couldn’t whitelist any domains.

    Adguard’s been 100% stable so far for me.

    • As long as it works fine for you I’m glad. :)
      If you’re interested here are my three bad experiences with AGH:

      • The “use AdGuard browsing security web service” option made all DNS queries so slow after a week to the point where nothing was resolved anymore. (That was 2 years ago, maybe fixed now)
      • They removed some library with an update which caused a panic when booting AGH so it wouldn’t start anymore. That library was needed to use the DoH encryption of one of my upstream DNS servers. I had to remove that one from my config.
      • The next update didn’t fix this issue but added another one: A few hours of running this version ( I don’t remember the version number) the AGH service suddenly crashed. I started it again but 5 minutes later it would crash again. That was the point where I stopped using AGH because it didn’t feel reliable anymore and updates only made it worse.
      • Fair enough!

        It’s just worked out of the box for me - and TIL it actually existed two years ago, I hadn’t heard of it until about six months ago.

        But yes - it’s great to have choices and pihole deserves some extra credit for blazing the trail in this area.