Network Security
1 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Language | License | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Pi-hole Network-wide ad blocking DNS | 56.3k | — | Shell | — | 72 |
Our Analysis
If you're tired of ads on every device in your house — phones, smart TVs, tablets, everything — Pi-hole blocks them at the network level before they ever reach your screen. Instead of installing ad blockers on each device, you point your router's DNS to a Pi-hole server and it filters ad domains for your entire network. 56K stars, community-driven, runs on a Raspberry Pi or any Linux box. It works as a DNS sinkhole — when a device tries to load an ad domain, Pi-hole returns nothing. You get a web dashboard showing every DNS query, which devices are chatty, and what's being blocked. Most users see 20-40% of all DNS queries blocked. Fully free. No paid tier, no premium features, no cloud version. Donations accepted but nothing is gated. Setup takes 30 minutes if you've never touched a command line. Ongoing ops: almost zero. It just runs. Updates are a single command. The only real maintenance is occasionally whitelisting a domain that got caught in a blocklist. Solo home users: install it, forget about it. Small offices: works great on a shared network. The catch: it can't block ads embedded in the same domain as content (like YouTube ads served from youtube.com). For that, you still need a browser extension like uBlock Origin. And if you misconfigure it, every device on your network loses DNS resolution — so don't experiment on a Friday night.