īecause Pi-hole blocks domains at the network level, it is able to block advertisements, such as banner advertisements on a webpage, but it can also block advertisements in unconventional locations, such as on Android, iOS and smart TVs. If a match is found within any of the lists, or a locally-configured blacklist, Pi-hole will refuse to resolve the requested domain and respond to the requesting device with a dummy address. It obtains lists of advertisement and tracking domains from a configurable list of predefined sources, and compares DNS queries against them. The application acts as a DNS server for a private network (replacing any pre-existing DNS server provided by another device or the ISP), with the ability to block advertisements and tracking domains for users' devices. Pi-hole makes use of a modified dnsmasq called FTLDNS, cURL, lighttpd, PHP and the AdminLTE Dashboard to block DNS requests for known tracking and advertising domains. Since then, several contributors have joined the project.

The Pi-hole project was created by Jacob Salmela as an open source alternative to AdTrap in 2014 and was hosted on GitHub. 3 Difference from traditional advertisement blockers.

Pihole vs adguard