DNS options - ADguard Home Vs PiHole Vs Technitium

Mikey

Mikey

Mikey

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Starting to look at DNS options again with the above options, anyone had particular experiences of them? I’ll be spinning up instances of them on the virtual server to have a further look.

At present pfsense is handling external DNS request with upstream TLS DNS servers. I have conditional forwarding rules to other zones I have internally.

I have AD on one VLAN for personal testing and such, Synology is hosting another zone.

So thought was to have one of the above services running on a VM / Raspberry Pi.
 
Mikey said:
At present pfsense is handling external DNS request with upstream TLS DNS servers.
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If you're sticking with PFSense (rather than moving to OPNSense) then PFBlockerNG would be another logical option to consider.

Personally I've stuck with PiHole both at home and at work, and never had an issue. But if PiHole development stopped tomorrow I'd have no worries switching to AdGuard Home
 
I switched to Adguard home after migrating my router over to OPNsense. Can't say I have had problems with either of them! Only reason for moving over was the community package for Adguard home in OPNsense!
 
Armageus said:
If you're sticking with PFSense (rather than moving to OPNSense) then PFBlockerNG would be another logical option to consider.

Personally I've stuck with PiHole both at home and at work, and never had an issue. But if PiHole development stopped tomorrow I'd have no worries switching to AdGuard Home
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I have PFBlockerNG for IP block lists, but I do switch around with firewalls, hence also want to have some centralised on the virtual stack with a pi-hole.

pfsense/opnsense/Sophos XG, but never gelled with opnsense, so it rarely stays in the stack. Did have a Unifi review recently for switching to a UDM-SE, but passing on that atm.
 
ChrisD. said:
I Use Adguard Home after switching from PiHole a few years ago, no regrets and I've never had any issue with it.
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Cheers, will have a look.

Poolybit said:
I switched to Adguard home after migrating my router over to OPNsense. Can't say I have had problems with either of them! Only reason for moving over was the community package for Adguard home in OPNsense!
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I wouldn't have it integrated into opnsense.
 
I run an Adguard instance on both my Unraid and Proxmox servers. I found Adguard easier to configure than PiHole so just went with it. Haven’t had any issues with either instance - both are fast and block so much crap it’s unreal
 
Found AGH a bit more mature than pi-hole - granted I haven't used pi-hole now for maybe 6-7 years but I always found it lacking compared to AGH, and once I swapped over there's been no reason to go back.
 
used most of them, all do the same thing really, no really difference with performance

right now I have DNS1 as piHole and DNS2 as AGH, just cos.
 
You may enjoy this thread. Plenty of discussion about Technitium, Blocky, AGH, Pi-Hole etc. I've run AGH since it was first in beta, no regrets (but it does have its foibles). Currently running an Nginx load balancer on a VPS 1ms away from my home, with ns1. and ns2. at my domain name self hosted at home, and tertiary backup running on the VPS in case my WAN goes down for any reason. Technitium is fast, nice and powerful (authoritative plus recursive), but does lean on .NET (cough). Also consider PowerDNS, Knot Resolver and Blocky.

e: I should have mentioned, I'm looking at switching out Nginx and AGH for dnsdist and pdns soon (currently testing in-lab). Nginx is fantastic and lean, but dnstist is tiny and purpose built from the ground for this. Not applicable in your case though. You might also check out the Pi-Hole thread which is huge, but covers much of the discussion you're seeking.
 
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ChrisD. said:
I Use Adguard Home after switching from PiHole a few years ago, no regrets and I've never had any issue with it.
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Same path I took. Ive not used PiHole for years but AdGuard was certainly a more polished product. Mine runs in Docker.

I like the fact your upstream DNS server can be used via DNS over HTTPS in AdGuard. PiHole might support this also now though.
 
PiHole is easy enough to setup but doesn't support DoH natively. You need to add something else upstream of PiH for that. They all do the same thing, really. There isn't a bad choice other than no DNS filtering at all!
 
Take a look at blocky too! This was my favourite as it's fast, feature rich and config is a declarative file only. Not as easy if you want a UI and logs out of the box but it can be done too.
 
The program you use isn't so much the deciding factor here, it's the adlists you use. Are you "actually" going to pay attention to all the graphs? I know it feels like you would but you probably won't. The adlists themselves are the key IMO.
 
Steveocee said:
The program you use isn't so much the deciding factor here, it's the adlists you use. Are you "actually" going to pay attention to all the graphs? I know it feels like you would but you probably won't. The adlists themselves are the key IMO.
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I agree there and I haven't delved through the lists I wish to try yet.
 
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