Pi-hole
Blackhole for Internet advertisements with a GUI for management and monitoring.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 49% of tracked projects; popularity more than 98%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 61k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | v6.4.3 · 6 Jul 2026 |
| Repo updated | 6 Jul 2026 |
| Licence | EUPL-1.2 |
| Built with | Shell, PHP, Docker |
Is Pi-hole actively maintained?
Development is ongoing. The repository recorded 254 commits over the same window, and the last three months alone account for 29 of them.
Activity is cooling: commits are down 75% against the previous quarter. One slow quarter is normal; two in a row is a signal.
The most recent tagged release, v6.4.3, is about 3 months old.
Pi-hole ranks #4 of 6 in DNS, placing it mid-table for maintenance activity.
What Pi-hole actually does
Pi-hole acts as a network-wide DNS sinkhole that blocks advertisements and trackers before they reach your devices. It includes a web-based graphical interface for managing blocklists and monitoring DNS query traffic in real time. Written in Shell and PHP, it can be deployed directly on host operating systems or packaged as a container.
Best fit: It suits self-hosters who want centralised, network-level ad blocking without needing client-side extensions on every individual device.
Worth knowing: Blocking domains at the DNS level inevitably breaks some legitimate website content, tracking pixels required by certain applications, or deep-linked ads, requiring manual whitelist curation.
Deployment notes
Containerised deployments typically require persistent storage volumes to retain query logs and blocklists across restarts, alongside standard port mapping for DNS resolution.
Links
Alternatives to Pi-hole
Projects in the same categories, ordered by health score.
User-friendly ads & trackers blocking DNS server.
Authoritative/recursive DNS server with ad blocking functionality.
Fast and lightweight DNS proxy as ad-blocker for local network with many features (alternative to Pi-hole).
Ad-blocking DNS resolver with DNSSEC-validating recursive resolution, DoH/DoT/Oblivious DoH, ephemeral overrides, and local service domains, in a single Rust binary (alternative to Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, NextDNS).
Local ad blocker. Like Pi-hole but local and using your operating system.