Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home vs Technitium: which DNS ad-blocker to run
I've run three of the popular self-hosted DNS ad-blockers, and they aren't the same kind of software. Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, and Technitium all listen on port 53 and all kill ads, but they start from different places, and that difference matters more than which blocklist you paste in first.
The short version
Pi-hole is the oldest, with the biggest blocklist ecosystem and a dashboard that shows its age. AdGuard Home is the same kind of blocking with a modern UI and the features most homes actually use built in. Technitium is a real DNS server with blocking attached, the pick when your DNS ambitions outgrow an appliance.
If you're starting fresh, start with AdGuard Home. If Pi-hole has been quietly annoying you for years like it did me, the move is easy. Technitium is the upgrade path for people who want to own DNS itself, not just filter it.
What they actually are
Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole. It answers every DNS query on your network, checks the domain against your blocklists, and sends the matches to a black hole instead of the real address. That's the whole job, and it has done it well for over a decade. Under the hood it runs FTLDNS, which Pi-hole describes as the popular dnsmasq with a layer of its own changes on top. FTL brings DNS, DHCP, and TFTP together in one piece, so you don't install dnsmasq yourself. Blocklists are the whole ecosystem: you stack filtering lists together and it drops everything they flag.
AdGuard Home is a Go binary that does the blocking and keeps going. It is a DNS sinkhole just like Pi-hole, but the feature set is bigger out of the box: per-client rules, a DHCP server, access controls, DNS rewrites, conditional forwarding per upstream, and DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS for both its own upstream queries and for clients that connect to it. All of it ships in one binary plus a config file and a web dashboard. AdGuard's own comparison with Pi-hole is honest about it: most of those features would need extra software bolted onto Pi-hole.
Technitium is a full DNS server with blocking attached. It is both an authoritative and a recursive DNS server, so it can own zones for domains you control and resolve recursively instead of forwarding upstream. Blocking runs off block-list URLs that refresh daily, but that's one small part of a server that also handles DNSSEC, encrypted forwarders, a REST API, TOTP two-factor auth, and DNS-over-QUIC. It's the only one of the three that could replace more than your ad blocking.
Why I left Pi-hole
Pi-hole wasn't bad, it was old. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi at a fixed address and it blocked what I asked it to. The friction showed up in the fiddly corners, and the worst of it was local DNS names.
I wanted my NAS and the hypervisor to resolve by name on my own network, and Pi-hole's answer was conditional forwarding. It works, and it's a real feature, but it means leaning on the dnsmasq config rather than clicking a button in a dashboard. Every small tweak became a config-file excursion, and that's the kind of bookkeeping that grinds you down over time.
What AdGuard Home gave me
Switching to AdGuard Home was mostly relief. Rewrites and per-network blocking rules live in the UI, not a config file. Conditional forwarding to a specific upstream per domain is a settings page. Per-client config is per-client: if a device should skip filtering, that's its own row. I point clients at a second instance for failover and it carries the work without me hovering over it.
The blocking itself is about the same with the same lists. That's the honest thing to say, and AdGuard's own comparison table concedes it: both block ads and trackers, both let you customize blocklists. Where AdGuard earns the switch is the daily stuff, not the raw block count: DNS over HTTPS for the phone when I'm away from the house, a device that skips the filter, name resolution on my LAN without touching a config file.
I'll also say what it can't do, because the DNS people are honest about it and you should know going in. No DNS blocker catches YouTube or Twitch ads, because those share a domain with the content itself. Same for sponsored posts in social feeds. If that's your main goal, DNS-level blocking alone won't get you there.
When Technitium is the right choice
Technitium earns its keep if you want authoritative zones for domains you own, or a single box doing recursion, filtering, DHCP, DNSSEC, and a REST API all at once. It's a real DNS server, and that carries a steeper start and more decisions about how you run it. For an ordinary home network that just wants the ads dead, AdGuard Home is more than enough and simpler to live with.
I keep it queued for the day I stop forwarding outbound to a public resolver and decide to recurse myself. That's a someday project, not a right-now one.
Bottom line
Pi-hole is a great first sinkhole and it's earned its reputation. AdGuard Home runs the same blocking but puts the features most homes actually use in front of you instead of behind a config file. Technitium is a real DNS server with blocking attached, for when you want to own resolution itself.