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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Why would I use Blocky vs. Pi-Hole? It seems like a nice project but pi-hole is really mature; I'd love to see a feature comparison or a brag sheet showing what it's better at.

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It's a bit faster, yet it lacks a web UI. I prefer it, because I use it directly on the PC/ Laptop via Docker and I like text files more than binding web UIs to ports..

If you have a PFSense or OPNSense firewall/router, PFblockerNG also does a great job https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocke.... PFSense comes with a DNS Resolver with option to forward to these other resolvers. It has also too many other features to list especially useful to a homelab.

I had used Pi-hole and blocky. Pi-hole is nice for the non-expert who just wants to block ads, with a neat web interface. But with blocky, instead of a web interface you can fully configure blocky in a single nice-documented extensive YAML file. Metrics are retrieved per Prometheus and can be visually shown in something like Gragfana. It has A LOT of features and is faster. :)

It looks like it's much easy to setup DoH with blocky. Blocky's DoT doesn't work for me but it's a pain to setup with Pi-hole and it's impossible to make DoH work in Pi-hole.

For me single binary and single config file is a big one. Much easier to deploy and share configs for example. I have a PiHole running but I kind of dread setting up a second one for redundancy.

https://youtu.be/UjqZPLL0UvM

Blocky is better because it uses less resources ,only a single yml onfig file and dns queries are faster as it's stateless

Or AdGuard Home https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39276687

Or NextDNS to let someone else handle it.

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