I looked at Pi-hole recently but went with AdGuard Home. Nicer UI and nicer everything by all appearances. There's also a surprising amount of customization for something this slick, like being able to defer to my internal DNS for local private domain queries, etc.
I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away, and maybe I should look into that, but seemed like a relatively low-risk decision to go with this for now. And I can't say enough about how much more pleasant using things like the NYTimes app has been without the obnoxious ads.
Yes, it’s really awesome. The split-dns feature has all the options you would imagine.
I thought i would need a second dns server behind it, but i could add all the rules I need right into adguard home. It even supports DoT and DoH upstreams, which is still not a thing with many home routers.
About the give-away-for-free aspect I was also wondering. Do they maybe configure their dns servers as default upstream and hope many people keep the defaults? DNS is one of the best technologies to do data mining and sell the data. I guess it's also why all those easy to remember dns servers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 exist. Google and Cloudflare for sure don't do it just to be nice.
Disclaimer: adguard claims not to sell any customer data.
> I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away
Here is my reasoning. I can read up the documentation and set it up and get it working. I'm going to brag to my friends about how my home network has no pesky ads and stuff. They will ask me to “Set up for me, Set up for me.”
I cannot help them maintain, even if I do set it up for them, so -- I'm going to say, “You know what, instead of that complexity, they have a simple app-based setup that just works for just $29 a year for your whole family.”
See, I just got five of my friends to download and buy the service in that dinner party.
I believe this is the same philosophy of todays' tech Startups -- have an Open Source Product but build a commercial business on top of that.
I'm not entirely sure why AdGuard is giving this away, and maybe I should look into that, but seemed like a relatively low-risk decision to go with this for now. And I can't say enough about how much more pleasant using things like the NYTimes app has been without the obnoxious ads.