Pi-hole Alternatives

Pi-hole reviews and mentions

• 🏗️ Building my home server P5: Network-wide ad blocking with Pi-hole
  2 projects | dev.to | 16 Mar 2026

  In my previous blog post, I covered deploying containers, configuring UFW, and setting up Nginx as a reverse proxy for my services. In this post, I'm taking things a step further by adding network-wide ad blocking to my home lab using Pi-hole. Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and trackers at the network level, meaning every device on my local network benefits from it without needing any client-side software. It also comes with a slick web interface for monitoring DNS queries and managing blocklists. On top of that, I configured Pi-hole to handle local DNS resolution for all my home lab services, so I can access them by their subdomain names instead of remembering IP addresses and port numbers.

• Ask HN: Which DNS based ad blocker do you suggest?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Mar 2026
• Pi-hole behind Tailscale
  7 projects | dev.to | 12 Mar 2026

  Pi-hole is one of the many tools available that can improve your privacy. It operates as a DNS proxy, which points to a "real" DNS. You point your devices to it, and it filters out domains that are considered privacy threats.

• Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: DNS Server Comparison
  2 projects | dev.to | 9 Mar 2026

  Pi-hole uses FTLDNS (a fork of dnsmasq) as its DNS engine. It handles DNS resolution, DHCP, and provides a query logging/analytics dashboard. DNS filtering is its core purpose. Pi-hole site

• How I Set Up Tailscale for Secure Tunneling and Accessing Private LLMs
  1 project | dev.to | 7 Mar 2026

  So far, my primary use of the NAS has been to store pictures, videos, file backups, and host some small Docker containers. For example, I've been hosting a Heimdall instance to provide me with a customizable dashboard. A couple months ago, I decided to install a Pi-hole container for network wide adblocking. Setting up Pi-hole was a catalyst that drove me to dive deeper into what the NAS is capable of.

• Blocky vs Pi-hole: Lightweight DNS Blocking
  2 projects | dev.to | 24 Feb 2026

  Pi-hole is the most popular DNS-level ad blocker for self-hosting. It provides a web dashboard, query logging, analytics, DHCP, and a large ecosystem of community blocklists. Built with PHP and FTLDNS (forked dnsmasq). Pi-hole site

• TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2026

  Most popular platforms are tracking and spying on you. My friends and I also believe Slack private DMs are compromised as we often times see ads directly pertaining to oddball discussions we don't have outside of Slack.

  Most people here probably know this already, but you can minimize some of this by using privacy browser extensions [1], containerized browsing [2], a good VPN [3], and/or Pihole [4].

  1: https://duckduckgo.com/compare-privacy?tab=extensions

  2: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...

  3: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CRtEQzSVE59jj5ROKZlt... (*do your research, e.g. NordVPN creeps me out with aggressive advertising practices even though they're highly rated)

  4: https://pi-hole.net/

• When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2026

  - https://pi-hole.net/ (good enough but not `hardcore`)

• I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2026

  https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

  Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:

  -Keep system and software updated.

• Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2025

  This might be useful for you: https://pi-hole.net/. You can set your own DNS server at home and block specific domains

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  www.saashub.com | 12 Aug 2026

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