I ran pihole for a long time and then used AdGuardHome for a while before switching to NextDNS. And my experience was that AdGuardHome was an enormously more advanced product. Among other things, the ability to natively support encrypted DNS protocols like DoH, DoT, and dnscrypt both as a client and server was a huge advantage over pihole. AdGuardHome also made split horizon DNS much easier to configure, especially for multiple domains. Basically, my pihole setup eventually did what I wanted after installing a lot of extra software and editing config files by hand. I could do all of those things through the AdGuardHome GUI.

I'll admit I briefly switching back to pihole after Russia invaded Ukraine given that AdGuard is a Russian company. Whether or not that was a reasonable choice, the technical step back was obvious and noticeable.

AdGuard is not a russian company since long time ago. We moved the HQ in 2014, the core team including the owners are also on Cyprus, and finally half of AdGuard websites are even blocked by russian authorities. Anyways, I guess we’ll never get rid of this badge so ignore my rant:)

Maybe link to a source for this info and people will recognize.

It’s better in every respect you could name

The Readme file has a section on that:

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome#how-does-adguard-...

I could be wrong but I don’t think pihole supports DNS over TLS out of the box. But AdGuard does

This is one setting on a regular router IIRC.