Quartermaster
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How-to9 July 2026Lewis E.

Blocking ads across your whole network with AdGuard Home or Pi-hole

Network-level ad blocking cleans up every device at once, including the ones you cannot install anything on. Here is how the two main options differ and what to watch after.

Browser ad blockers only cover the browser. Block ads at the DNS layer instead and you cover everything on the network, the smart TV that has no extensions, the phone apps, the fridge, all of it, from one place. The two tools everyone reaches for are Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. They do the same core job in slightly different ways.

How it works

Both act as the DNS server for your network. When a device asks where an ad or tracker domain lives, they simply refuse to answer for anything on a blocklist, so it never loads. Point your router's DNS at the machine running one of them and every device is covered automatically.

Pi-hole

The long-standing favourite. Rock solid, huge community, endless guides. Its interface is functional rather than pretty, and some of the nicer touches come from add-ons. If you want the option with the most written about it and the least to surprise you, this is it.

AdGuard Home

A single binary that does DNS blocking plus a few things Pi-hole needs extras for: encrypted DNS out of the box, per-client rules, and a cleaner default interface. If you like one tidy package and modern defaults, it tends to feel nicer to live with.

Either one is a good choice. Pick on feel, not on fear of picking wrong.

Set it up without locking yourself out

  • Stand it up and test it on one device before you point the whole network at it.
  • Set two upstream DNS servers so a single failure does not take your internet with it.
  • Have a fallback in mind. If the blocker goes down and it is your only DNS, the whole house loses the internet, which is how you end up explaining DNS to your family at nine at night.

Then keep half an eye on it

DNS is invisible until it breaks, and when it breaks it looks like "the internet is down" rather than "the ad blocker is down." So the one habit worth building is an occasional glance: is it up, is it still answering, is a new blocklist quietly eating something it should not. A site that suddenly will not load is far more often an over-eager block than a real outage, and knowing that saves you a lot of pointless router reboots.

Written while building Quartermaster, a native iOS app for self-hosted stacks.