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Does anyone know of a good adBlocker?

Polly Mercocet said:
Buy a Raspberry Pi, install AdGuard Home on it, set it as your DNS server.

I recommend AdGuard Home over Pi Hole because it's more feature complete out the box and, imo, has a superior UI. Plus if you install it as a snap, upgrades are automatic.
Click to expand...
Totally agree as in majority of the advanced features are builtin on adguard home, where pi-hole is more of manual method. Also both tools sets have IOS/IpadOS apps for management, though app for adguard home remote app has a lot more features. Ease of use, I would highly recommend adguard home, pi-hole if your more technical and like to fiddle around :)

However for me reliability was much more important. Used GRC dns speed bench, and when I was doing side by side comparison, adguard always came up with ~97% reliability where pi-hole always resulted in 100% reliability. Both had great performance and showed same results for retrieval speed.

Both are great choice however for me I stayed with pi-hole. In fact out of curiosity I just spun up another instance of adguard home to see if the reliability issue was resolved, and got the same result again

Adguard | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 97.7 |
- Uncached Name | 0.004 | 0.085 | 0.212 | 0.065 | 97.7 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.007 | 0.028 | 0.038 | 0.011 | 100.0 |
---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------

Pi-Hole | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
+ Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
+ Uncached Name | 0.002 | 0.067 | 0.189 | 0.057 | 100.0 |
+ DotCom Lookup | 0.017 | 0.036 | 0.072 | 0.011 | 100.0 |
---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

Keep in mind, adguard install was very vanilla, and my pi-hole is tuned with multiple enhancement so it may not be a true fair test. But overall still concerning to see ~97% reliability rate.
 
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j0nblayz said:
Totally agree as in majority of the advanced features are builtin on adguard home, where pi-hole is more of manual method. Also both tools sets have IOS/IpadOS apps for management, though app for adguard home remote app has a lot more features. Ease of use, I would highly recommend adguard home, pi-hole if your more technical and like to fiddle around :)

However for me reliability was much more important. Used GRC dns speed bench, and when I was doing side by side comparison, adguard always came up with ~97% reliability where pi-hole always resulted in 100% reliability. Both had great performance and showed same results for retrieval speed.

Both are great choice however for me I stayed with pi-hole. In fact out of curiosity I just spun up another instance of adguard home to see if the reliability issue was resolved, and got the same result again

Adguard | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 97.7 |
- Uncached Name | 0.004 | 0.085 | 0.212 | 0.065 | 97.7 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.007 | 0.028 | 0.038 | 0.011 | 100.0 |
---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------

Pi-Hole | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
+ Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
+ Uncached Name | 0.002 | 0.067 | 0.189 | 0.057 | 100.0 |
+ DotCom Lookup | 0.017 | 0.036 | 0.072 | 0.011 | 100.0 |
---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
Click to expand...

Interesting reliability results. Subjectively I had the opposite experience. Using Pi Hole I had bugs that appeared to be router issues but magically went away when I changed the DNS server. That's when I first tried AdGuard Home instead, because Pi Hole was giving me problems even after a clean reinstall of the full OS on the Pi.

Perhaps the reliability depends on the router you're using, what Pi you have, and other network specific factors. I'm using an 8GB Pi 4 so lack of horsepower certainly shouldn't be my issue for something designed to run on a Pi.

No problems at all using AdGuard Home on my setup. Been much smoother than Pi Hole. And I love that it supports multiple types of encrypted DNS and will even load balance multiple DNS servers. That functionality alone puts it ahead of Pi Hole, which can only use encrypted DNS at all through manually configuring cloudflared.

Then there's the lack of regex support for blocklists on Pi Hole. This is a serious advantage for AdGuard Home. Regex lists make the ad blocking far superior without needing thousands of lines for every single individual domain. I'm sure this saves resources as well. One line of regex can literally replace hundreds of lines of raw domain names in some cases.
 
Polly Mercocet said:
Interesting reliability results. Subjectively I had the opposite experience. Using Pi Hole I had bugs that appeared to be router issues but magically went away when I changed the DNS server. That's when I first tried AdGuard Home instead, because Pi Hole was giving me problems even after a clean reinstall of the full OS on the Pi.

Perhaps the reliability depends on the router you're using, what Pi you have, and other network specific factors. I'm using an 8GB Pi 4 so lack of horsepower certainly shouldn't be my issue for something designed to run on a Pi.

No problems at all using AdGuard Home on my setup. Been much smoother than Pi Hole. And I love that it supports multiple types of encrypted DNS and will even load balance multiple DNS servers. That functionality alone puts it ahead of Pi Hole, which can only use encrypted DNS at all through manually configuring cloudflared.

Then there's the lack of regex support for blocklists on Pi Hole. This is a serious advantage for AdGuard Home. Regex lists make the ad blocking far superior without needing thousands of lines for every single individual domain. I'm sure this saves resources as well. One line of regex can literally replace hundreds of lines of raw domain names in some cases.
Click to expand...
Oh trust me, I love adguard ease of management over pi-hole for sure. I use Sophos XG for my perimeter gateway and run multiple pi-hole vm's for redundancy. Its bit more effort to manage vs adguard but either way, both are great DNS replacement.

regarding regex, pi-hole finally has it :)

I may tuned up adguard over the weekend and give it another go, I really love the iOS app for remote management, where the remote app for pi-hole is so limited. I'll spend some time over the weekend and see if I can improve the reliability.

Also wanted to ask you more of the load balancing. Are you saying load balancing for the upstream dns servers? or do you have a VIP setup to have a single dns IP to load balance between the 2 adguard servers? I'll be very interested to hear if adguard has some type of built in load balance between the 2 adguards, as I dont see any ability built in for load balancing, other than upstream dns servers.
 
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j0nblayz said:
Oh trust me, I love adguard ease of management over pi-hole for sure. I use Sophos XG for my perimeter gateway and run multiple pi-hole vm's for redundancy. Its bit more effort to manage vs adguard but either way, both are great DNS replacement.

regarding regex, pi-hole finally has it :)

I may tuned up adguard over the weekend and give it another go, I really love the iOS app for remote management, where the remote app for pi-hole is so limited. I'll spend some time over the weekend and see if I can improve the reliability.

Also wanted to ask you more of the load balancing. Are you saying load balancing for the upstream dns servers? or do you have a VIP setup to have a single dns IP to load balance between the 2 adguard servers? I'll be very interested to hear if adguard has some type of built in load balance between the 2 adguards, as I dont see any ability built in for load balancing, other than upstream dns servers.
Click to expand...

quick update. Spent some time building up 2 more Adguard Home servers and set it up with unbound for upstream, and also conditional forwarding for my internal domain. Was able to finally get 100% reliability, however performance seems to still bit behind pi-hole.

Pi-hole | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
+ Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.001 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
+ Uncached Name | 0.003 | 0.096 | 0.373 | 0.081 | 100.0 |
+ DotCom Lookup | 0.019 | 0.036 | 0.051 | 0.009 | 100.0 |
---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

AdGuard| Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
- Uncached Name | 0.000 | 0.519 | 0.726 | 0.159 | 100.0 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.504 | 0.522 | 0.535 | 0.010 | 100.0 |
---<O-OO---->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

Will be testing more over the weekend, but really loving the additional features in AdGuard, able to setup custom rules per ip/device so I can enable more secure rules for the kid's. Not ready to fully cutover to Adguard, but will be switching over couple vLAN's over to test throughout the weekend.
 
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I have been using this for years and it works perfectly.
5868833A-0608-4E6B-99ED-6A088A08BEC7.png
 
j0nblayz said:
Spent some time building up 2 more Adguard Home servers and set it up with unbound for upstream, and also conditional forwarding for my internal domain. Was able to finally get 100% reliability, however performance seems to still bit behind pi-hole.
Click to expand...

I'm curious, was Unbound set as upstream for your last reliability tests as well? If it wasn't, and you had multiple encrypted DNS servers listed, that may explain the 97.7%. It may have needed a bit of time to load balance the DNS servers. It does this on a round robin basis by default. Not noticeable in real world use, in fact a useful feature since if a DNS server starts showing too much latency it'll auto-switch to another one, but I imagine it'll show up if you monitor performance.
 
Hi,
Does anyone know if 1blocker is a Russian app? I have researched a bit, and it looks like it is a Russian company.
I am using it for 2 years, but in that case, I would like to drop it due to the current situation.Thank you if anyone can confirm.
 
Last edited:
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Ok I answer myself :) after more research, the company is Russian, so I will uninstall and go for Wipr as well. Thank you anyway.
 
nickbelane said:
Hi,
Does anyone know if 1blocker is a Russian app? I have researched a bit, and it looks like it is a Russian company.
I am using it for 2 years, but in that case, I would like to drop it due to the current situation.Thank you if anyone can confirm.
Click to expand...
you do realise that the russian civilians are not to be blamed for this war and honest russian developer like the 1blockr app is not to be punished for the war on Ukraine. You won't be hurting Putin, but you will hurt an honest working man who just happens to be Russian.

The choice is yours of course.
 
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MacBH928 said:
you do realise that the russian civilians are not to be blamed for this war and honest russian developer like the 1blockr app is not to be punished for the war on Ukraine. You won't be hurting Putin, but you will hurt an honest working man who just happens to be Russian.

The choice is yours of course.
Click to expand...
Hi,
Yes, I do, but Russian companies can dissociate themselves posting something against the war on their pages or profiles. Here they didn’t post anything in their pages/social accounts, hence my decision.

Wipr is pretty good so far, actually it looks less aggressive and it allows comments on some blogs that the other app was blocking.
 
nickbelane said:
Hi,
Yes, I do, but Russian companies can dissociate themselves posting something against the war on their pages or profiles. Here they didn’t post anything in their pages/social accounts, hence my decision.

Wipr is pretty good so far, actually it looks less aggressive and it allows comments on some blogs that the other app was blocking.
Click to expand...

well if I wasn't in Putin's Russia I would be scared to mention that I am against the war myself , but if you like Wipr more you found a better product.
 
Edge. Lets me turn off ads and saves me a heck of a lot of battery when I browse, preventing these battery burning animations. One minor inconvenience is some web sites make you turn off the ad blocker if you want to enter. I just move on to the next site.
 
spartan1967 said:
Edge. Lets me turn off ads and saves me a heck of a lot of battery when I browse, preventing these battery burning animations. One minor inconvenience is some web sites make you turn off the ad blocker if you want to enter. I just move on to the next site.
Click to expand...

Edge or Brave? I didn't realise Edge has built in adblocker?!
best adblocker for all browsers is uBlockOrigin (look it up) but it does not exist for safari, best for Safari imo is adguard for safari and 1Blockr. Others work just as well like Wipr . Pick whatever you like

You might want to considering installing a PiHole for a network wide adblocking
 
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