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I used Pi-Hole, then went to NextDNS, then to AdGuard DNS, tinkered with AdGuard Home, and currently testing Control-D. They are all actually pretty good, similar features, and it has become just a matter of personal choice.
In all fairness, when I have some time and can invest in decent hardwares, I might go back to AdGuard Home with one of the paid services as backup for travel, and when for the other family members.
Pi-Hole works really well but once-a-while, when I'm traveling, it will decide to act up and it's a whole IT support with the family over phone for minutes if not hours. I'm not smart enough to setup a secure enough tunnel and the like, and haven't read up enough on the topic. This follows similar pattern with AdGuard Home.
NextDNS, AdGuard DNS, Control-D are easy and just works, especially with the devices that the family uses. I think I bought one of those AdGuard Lifetime license, so I use that to block client-side rendered ads in conjunction with either AdGuard DNS or NextDNS or Control-D. Right now, Control-D is doing pretty good with my test-drive.
https://adguard-dns.io
https://nextdns.io
https://controld.com
The main repo is GPLv3: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome
They already have many other commercials products and I guess also the default filter rules are very good because of their experience in the domain.
But I think you can use it completely without the AdGuard servers and use other filter list sources.
I used Pi-Hole, then went to NextDNS, then to AdGuard DNS, tinkered with AdGuard Home, and currently testing Control-D. They are all actually pretty good, similar features, and it has become just a matter of personal choice.
In all fairness, when I have some time and can invest in decent hardwares, I might go back to AdGuard Home with one of the paid services as backup for travel, and when for the other family members.
Pi-Hole works really well but once-a-while, when I'm traveling, it will decide to act up and it's a whole IT support with the family over phone for minutes if not hours. I'm not smart enough to setup a secure enough tunnel and the like, and haven't read up enough on the topic. This follows similar pattern with AdGuard Home.
NextDNS, AdGuard DNS, Control-D are easy and just works, especially with the devices that the family uses. I think I bought one of those AdGuard Lifetime license, so I use that to block client-side rendered ads in conjunction with either AdGuard DNS or NextDNS or Control-D. Right now, Control-D is doing pretty good with my test-drive.
https://adguard-dns.io
https://nextdns.io
https://controld.com
I ran a competing project[0] on my home network for a few years before I discovered NextDNS[1]. What I lost in performance (requests don't leave my house) I gained in portability: ALL my devices can take advantage – at home and away – and time-saved. PiHole works 90% of the time, but when it did stop working, I'd have to spend a bit of time fixing it. At $20/year, I simply couldn't compete with NextDNS.
Note: This isn't a shill for NextDNS; I love these kinds of projects and think they absolutely should exist, but NextDNS just happens to be one of those dead-simple SaaS tools that is an insanely good value.
0 - https://pi-hole.net/
1 - https://nextdns.io
It works on minimal hardware. I am running it on an Orange Pi 3 LTS.
https://technitium.com/dns/
It entirely depends on which blocklist(s) you use. I had to stop using the StevenBlack list because it started breaking a lot of things, apparently intentionally.
I switched to the https://oisd.nl Big List, which has been great... although it did break GitHub yesterday. That was the first breakage since I switched, and it was fixed when I reported. But still, keeping an eye on it.
Hagezi blocklists are the current standard now: https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
You could go for one of the Lite blocklists for the network wide, family friendly (non-breaking) list.