nextdns VS unifios-utilities

I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year.

https://controld.com

https://nextdns.io

https://adguard-dns.io

Okay but NextDNS' own homepage says it "blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps" - https://nextdns.io

I first used Safari on Windows around 2006. Put me off forever.

You just need Firefox and the extensions that mean ads are never seen.

That said, take a look at https://nextdns.io

just run snort and get nextdns.io account and use those DNS servers to control your DNS.

I'm using NextDNS which can be integrated into TailScale MagicDNS. It works seamlessly. You may need to pay if you have a high usage rate. I pay for the Pro version but that's less than $30 CAD a year. I did have in house Raspberry PI and Pi-Hole DNS but it was a lot of work.

pretty much to the same effect of a pihole, yet you can get up and running in minutes. You can then configure wherever you please: your browser, your laptop, your phone, or even your router.

[0]: https://nextdns.io

Check out NextDNS. You can set recreation time and block things like YouTube and Instagram at all times of the day except during your recreation time. Mine for instance is between 6pm and 9pm. At all other times, I can have it blocked. They market this feature to parents, which I think is short sighted because it’s great for productivity and works much more effectively at the network level compared to blocking apps which, at least on iOS, are limited in their capabilities.

Update: So I can see in https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki that the nextdns CLI I set up in opnsense is DOH, but I swear this wouldn’t work the first time I installed it, hence why I set up DOT. So confused now lol!

I just purchased the unifi express and I have been researching its capabilities and more specifically ad blocking functionality. I have found that people are complaining about the ad blocking abilities not being very granular and referring to unifios-utilities and running something like pi hole or adguard as an alternative. Can I safely assume that these options will be available to the unifi express?

https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities <- this cannot be more simple to digest. Stop spreading FUD (and learn to code if you still don't understand how Github works and what is linked)

Install on boot script: https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities/tree/main/on-boot-script

(https://github.com/unifi-utilities/unifios-utilities)

Not natively but they run dnsmasq so you can use unifios-utilities with an on-boot-script to modify dnsmasq’s config and add whatever records you need, including wildcard