Pi-Hole vs AdGuard vs NextDNS
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?
All kind of achieve the same thing, but in different ways.
Pi-Hole is the completely free way of doing ad and tracker blocking at the DNS level. Free as in free beer and free as in free speech.
AdGuard is free as in free beer but not as in free speech.
Both solutions mentioned above have to be self-hosted.
NextDNS is a managed service for which you have to pay a (very small) monthly fee for. The advantage is that - once setup - it pretty much just works (exception being custom updates to filter lists, but that applies to the other two as well). What's cool about that is that it's reachable from outside your local network, so you can use it on your phone or whatever even when you're not at home (they offer apps and profiles for easy setup). You can expose your Pi-Hole/AdGuard DNS to the outside world, but this has some caveats and probably higher latency/worse availability.
Opinions differ when it comes to privacy, but I'd say they (NextDNS) are trustworthy/not selling your data as this doesn't seem to be their business model. Obviously, with Pi-Hole you don't have to trust anyone (except the code authors unless you study the code yourself), so when in doubt Pi-Hole wins in this regard.
Be careful when setting up either of these as the default DNS service in your home network, especially when other users are in your network, as the default configuration of either of these will break some websites, services and apps to stop working and you (the admin) would have to handle the errors your users are getting by adding exceptions and/or different filters. The good news is that there are more conservative filter settings available that will still block most ads and trackers while being way less likely to break anything.
Eli5 free as in free beer and free as in free speech?
Free beer is freeware, but it can be closed source.
Free speech is freeware that's also open source with a permissive license, so you can create an opinionated version of it.
Free as in beer - Free in the sense of costing no money.
Free as in speech - Free in the sense of having no restrictions; libre.
AdGuard is free as in free beer but not as in free speech.
I think in the context of this discussion, they are talking about AdGuard Home, which is GPL. So it's also free as in free speech.
Pihole is most popular among self holsters. It has nice GUI, it’s capable and its solid. It’s basic in sense of DNS features. You need to use config files to customize from terminal and even then it’s limited.
Adguard in my experience has more advanced blocking features. DNS also allows you little more flexibility like wildcard records. You can have separate config for different clients (like guest/kids network blocking)
NextDNS is SaaS only. It has most advanced blocking features but free account only gets you limited queries monthly. You can choose to keep your logs on specific servers or not to keep at all… from privacy perspective it’s arguably worse because you have to trust another company but it’s a good middle ground. Self hosted still needs upstream DNS but it could be tunneled through VPN which would anonymize traffic. NextDNS is upstream dns and it can’t distinguish internal network source.
I would throw zenarmor to the mix https://www.zenarmor.com/. Paid home license costs 10$/month and allows 3 different profiles. It is more advanced as it sniffs all network packets and not only DNS. It’s not replacing dns. It has great reports/dashboards.
For best DNS capabilities I would recommend technitium https://technitium.com/dns/. It’s free. You have gui, dns blocking and full DNS capability with some advanced plugins. It’s not as fancy for dashboards like pihole or Adguard.
You would use combination of solutions and nextDNS could be your upstream if you don’t mind paying them. If privacy is your thing you want to have more generic upstream that everyone uses like quad9.
Wait, you tunnel queries to your upstream DNS through a VPN? Nice.
I'll try to take a look at Blocky when I have the time
Wait, you tunnel queries to your upstream DNS through a VPN?
I use Tailscale to do this and it works quite well. I also use it to keep my pihole always reachable from my devices so I can continue to use it as my DNS server even when my phone is on cell data, etc.
I run a secondary Pihole on an AWS host that is also linked by tailscale as a fallback
Yes! I have a split DNS setup with technitium using advanced forwarding plugin. You can set different upstream based on client IP or subnet. So this way you can send to vpn DNS to prevent leaking.
Also you can have multiple piholes (poor mans setup) and have each configured filtering for dedicated VLAN. For instance be more strict for guest kids and less on adults net. Adguard can do that without having to have many instances but then Adguard can’t forward traffic based on origin IP. You can make any kind of logic and send different clients to different upstreams. As far as I know only BIND provides this functionality through views but it’s more complicated setup and no lovely GUI. You can always send all traffic through tunnel but then some results may be not ideal if you will be detected to be in different country and content will be served in other language. I think results will vary based on VPN endpoint. You don’t need to tunnel through vpn if you use DNS over https. It’s completely invisible to the ISP. VPN is more of a use case if you want to be consistent with your exit IP and DNS queries.
+1 for technitium dns. It’s perfect. I use it along with nextdns.
I use Pi-Hole and works great. I’ve heard about AdGuard and seems the same thing as PiHole
Only if you're talking about AdGuard Home, then yes. When you talk about AdGuard you usually just mean the adblocker app which is something completely different.
I used all three of them. While AdGuard Home has some nice features that Pi-hole doesn't, it in my experience has much more problems and has been unstable on some updates. So since you prefer stability for your DNS server I'd recommend Pi-hole over AdGuard Home.
NextDNS doesn't need to be self-hosted because it's a service on the internet. The disadvantage is that you are offered a list of blocklists from which you can choose but unlike Pi-hole or AdGuard Home you cannot add more lists. But they offer many lists so that's not a big problem. If you need more than 300k queries a month you need to pay for their service. But since NextDNS is a service on the internet it means that you can use it on all of your devices no matter where you are.
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:
I currently selfhost AdGuard Home and it works very efficiently. I added custom lists plus personal filters, and as a plus, I exposed the DoT on the web, so I can use the device I "authorized" no matter where I am. Big plus for me
You are incorrect. You can add custom lists to NextDNS
Edit: I am so sorry. Apparently I was completely misremembering my setup.
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I too was under the impression that you couldn't add custom lists to NextDNS. Last time I researched this everything I found said you couldn't as well. I know you can build your deny list but that can be time consuming. I do it, but would love to be able to pull block lists that are already compiled. Can you share more info on how to add custom lists to NextDNS? Thanks!
Really? How do I do that? I'd love to add the Neo Dev Host List to NextDNS.
NextDNS seems cool but it looks like it is for-profit and proprietary software, which is a deal breaker for me. Even if their "free" tier were good for me, for now, the price and my privacy would always be subject to the whims of a company who is going to be trying to get money from me. Fuck that.
I am honestly surprised to see it recommended here on Lemmy. When I first heard of it, I went to their website to see what it's all about. I assumed it would be another self hosted DNS service, not a paid proprietary cloud service.
I wondered if it is astroturfing.
Just to clarify, you don't need to install an app or extension to use AdGuard, you can just use its dns servers. I use their own dns for my phone, so that it works everywhere, but I use my self hosted AdGuard instance at home.
I haven't needed to change anything in the filters yet, but by self hosting, I've got the option if it's ever needed.
Adguard
Adguard is a VPN. And does what essentially Mullvad does by sending ads or malware or anything they have marked malicious into a void. Pi-hole works very similarly.
NextDNS works similarly by funnelling all your requests through their DNS which has been set up to remove some of the bad stuff out there. Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) also has a similar service (though they just stick to malware): https://avoidthehack.com/best-dns-privacy