A Pi-hole alternative

A former colleague tipped me off about AdGuard Home. It looked clean, simple, with DoH support. I decided to give it a shot. Installation was very straightforward and the initial setup wizard is nicely guided. I got the HTTPS certificate via ZeroSSL, which supports email verification (in addition to DNS and HTTP).

So far I'm very happy. Each device can have its own settings assigned:

  • Block specific services (WhatsApp, Facebook, Viber, etc.)
  • Block suspicious domains (blacklisted domains)
  • Parental controls (adult domains)
  • Specific DNS servers

Animation of the AdGuard Home dashboard: general statistics, top clients, top queried domains and top blocked domains

If a page is blocked (Parental Control), the user sees an explanation why — similar to what you'd see on a corporate proxy.

AdGuard block page: the site was blocked because of parental control restrictions

A blocked malicious site looks like this:

AdGuard block page: the web page was reported as malicious and has been blocked

Previous Post Next Post

Other Related Posts:

adguard DNS Lets Encrypt Active24.cz DoH

DNS Security

DNS over HTTPs

Animation of the AdGuard Home dashboard: general statistics, top clients, top queried domains and top blocked domains
Since I'd already gone to the trouble of generating a certificate for the UDR, I made one for AdGuard Home too. For DoH to work you need a wildcard certificate. Active24 supports DNS-01 via its API, so issuing it is no problem.
The advantage of DoH is that HTTPS is already open (t...

8th Feb 2026