Software update: AdGuard Home 0.107.15 – Computer – Download

Prior to:
They both do what they have to do. Namely playing like a DNS sinkhole and they both do it technically well.

Aside from the technical differences of the software itself (pi-hole is a custom dnsmasq (pi-hole FTLDNS) with a lighttpd (pihole Web) web server with a full PHP installation around it and lots of brilliant scripts around it ( pihole Core) to keep things running, where AGH is a complete tool consisting of a binary and a configuration file), AGH has some functional advantages over pi-hole:

With no other third party software, AGH supports DoH, DoT, DoQ, etc. both internally and externally. So you can make encrypted DNS requests in your lan, but also use encrypted connections to upstream DNS servers. (everything is encrypted these days except the basics in the form of DNS, which I’ve always found odd)
AGH supports the most efficient ABP formats. (are approximately a factor of 3 less so flat hosts list which pi-hole it should use (because it is a dnsmasq server, which is not on it designed i.e., act as a DNS sinkhole)
AGH supports TLS certificates which you can configure directly in the GUI (no mess in the web server configuration files)
AGH can be run (under Linux) without root rights. I don’t know if it’s supported on BSD platforms. NB This requires you to do something once on the command line as root, but then it’s done.

The above are for me the main things that make AGH a better product than pi-hole.

Some niche stuff too:
AGH also has some standard switches to block all of Facebook (or Netflix or TikTok or I know a lot of what) at the same time.
AGH works on anything Linux / BSD-like or Windows-like. It has no third party dependencies. So you can put it on almost any nicer router and start it (provided the CPU architecture is supported). Pi-hole can only do this if the affected operating system has a PHP installation available and all the necessary libraries for the components (dnsmasq / lighttpd / PHP).

But:
What I have to give pi-hole is that I like their GUI the most, but it’s purely a matter of taste. pi-hole also has a CLI that you can do some things with (which I think you can do almost anything in the GUI, but I’m not sure about the latter)

At the bottom of the line, these are obviously typical products that once you get up and running you don’t really care anymore. After all, it is a means, not an end in itself.