AdGuard Home vs blocky

Both are self-hosted dns projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

AdGuard Home and blocky are closely matched on maintenance health (77 vs 76). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
AdGuard Homeblocky
Health score 77/100 76/100
Commits (11 mo) 229 303
Commits (last 3 mo) 84 127
Stars 37k 7k
Latest release 18 Aug 2026 5 Sept 2026
Licence GPL-3.0 Apache-2.0
Built with Docker Go, Docker
Typical RAM 2 GB 1 GB

AdGuard Home

User-friendly ads & trackers blocking DNS server.

77/100
Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 18/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 46% of tracked projects; popularity more than 94%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 26 commits 2025-11: 14 commits 2025-12: 13 commits 2026-01: 11 commits 2026-02: 22 commits 2026-03: 17 commits 2026-04: 26 commits 2026-05: 16 commits 2026-06: 15 commits 2026-07: 43 commits 2026-08: 26 commits

blocky

Fast and lightweight DNS proxy as ad-blocker for local network with many features (alternative to Pi-hole).

76/100
Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 21/40
Releases 25/25
Community 15/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 53% of tracked projects; popularity more than 73%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 44 commits 2025-11: 31 commits 2025-12: 10 commits 2026-01: 15 commits 2026-02: 10 commits 2026-03: 27 commits 2026-04: 11 commits 2026-05: 28 commits 2026-06: 65 commits 2026-07: 33 commits 2026-08: 29 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted dns.