AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

AdGuard Home is a free, open-source DNS server you run on your own network to block ads and tracking domains for all connected devices at once. It is a fit for people who control their own router or home server and want network-wide filtering without installing a blocker on each device. It is not a client-side ad blocker: because it works at the DNS level, ads served from the same domain as content (for example YouTube or Twitch) cannot be blocked by it.

What it does and how it works

Once installed and pointed at by your devices' DNS settings, AdGuard Home answers queries for tracking and advertising domains with a "black hole" response, so devices never connect to those servers. The server includes a built-in web admin interface with HTTPS, a DHCP server, encrypted upstream support (DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSCrypt), the ability to act as a DoH/DoT server itself, per-client configuration, access controls, parental control and forced safe search. It can also be run without root privileges. For users comparing with Pi-hole, the project advertises those features as bundled rather than requiring extra software, but the comparison table is the author's own.

Ways to run it

• Automated installer script for Linux, Unix, macOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
• Official Docker image and a Snap package on Linux.
• Manual installation, described in the project wiki.
• Building from source requires Go 1.25+, Node.js 24.10.0+ and npm 10.8+; the build rejects a non-standard parallel make -j flags setting.
• Integration is possible through a REST API (with an OpenAPI definition), a Python client, and a Home Assistant integration.

Limitations and privacy

The documentation's known limitations are intrinsic to DNS filtering, not bugs: YouTube and Twitch ads and sponsored posts that share a domain with content cannot be blocked; the project says DNS will never be enough for those cases. AdGuard Home does not collect usage statistics and does not use web services unless you configure it to. The license is GPL-3.0, so redistribution or modified deployment entails the usual copyleft obligations. Diagnostic comments in a 2024 Hacker News discussion praised the setup but also raised concerns about the vendor's corporate location; that is an opinion about provenance, not a verified defect, and the code is open for inspection.

HotRepo's take

The only tracked daily-board observation is 2026-10-30 at 37,933 stars (+107 that day), which is too thin to describe momentum. The repository's sustained relevance is better evidenced by its long list of third-party integrations and its age since 2016, not by a single day's count.

Project source and documentation