Network ad blockers and DNS filters in 2026

Commercial network ad blockers and DNS filters

1. 1
   Cisco Umbrella Cisco

   Cisco's enterprise network security provides advanced protection on a unified, cloud-delivered solution designed for the modern workplace.

   Complete system Production-ready A business or school wants a simple first layer of web filtering and threat blocking across all sites and devices.

   Commercial
2. 2
   NextDNS NextDNS

   NextDNS protects you from all kinds of security threats, blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids — on all devices and on all networks.

   Complete system Production-ready You want network-wide blocking on phones and laptops wherever they go without running a Pi-hole.

   Commercial

New open-source projects

1. 1
   Sigwood helixmap

   Local-first threat hunting for the logs you already have: Zeek, Pi-hole, syslog or the systemd journal, CloudTrail. Every run names the technique behind each detector. No agent, no daemon, no black box - between grep and a SIEM.

   Developer tool Experimental You want to look for suspicious activity in logs you already collect without standing up a SIEM.

   ★ 348 MIT Python Active, pushed 5 days ago

Open-source network ad blockers and DNS filters

Complete systems you can adopt 5

1. 1
   AdGuardHome AdguardTeam

   Network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server

   Complete system Production-ready You want Pi-hole-style blocking with built-in DoH, DoT and DoQ in a single binary.

   ★ 38k GPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today
2. 2
   DnsServer TechnitiumSoftware

   Technitium DNS Server

   Complete system Production-ready You want a full DNS server for your home or office, including authoritative zones, not just a blocker.

   ★ 10k GPL-3.0 C# Active, pushed 9 days ago
3. 3
   Blocky 0xERR0R

   Fast and lightweight DNS proxy as ad-blocker for local network with many features

   Complete system Production-ready You want Pi-hole-style network ad blocking as a single stateless binary configured in code, without a built-in web UI.

   ★ 7.1k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed yesterday
4. 4
   Esp32-c3-adblock M-Abozaid

   Pi-hole-class DNS ad-blocker on a $2 ESP32-C3 (no PSRAM): 537k domains as 40-bit FNV-1a hashes in flash, binary-searched. UDP DNS sinkhole + web dashboard. https://youtube.com/shorts/RaxszOUMi8E?feature=share

   Complete system Experimental You want network ad blocking on a tiny, very low-cost device and enjoy flashing microcontrollers.

   ★ 3.5k MIT C++ Active, pushed 27 days ago
5. 5
   Blockads-android pass-with-high-score

   Block ads system-wide on Android using local VPN-based DNS filtering. No root needed. No data collection.

   Complete system Usable You want system-wide ad and tracker blocking on an unrooted Android phone from a free open-source app.

   ★ 2.6k GPL-3.0 Kotlin Active, pushed today

Integrations 1

1. 1
   Pihole-exporter eko

   A Prometheus exporter for PI-Hole's Raspberry PI ad blocker

   Integration Production-ready You already run Prometheus and Grafana and want Pi-hole query and block numbers alongside your other monitoring.

   ★ 1.2k MIT Go Active, pushed 2 days ago

Developer tools 2

1. 1
   Pihole-updatelists jacklul

   Update Pi-hole's lists from remote sources easily

   Developer tool Usable You manage Pi-hole lists from curated remote collections such as Firebog and want them kept in step automatically.

   ★ 1.7k MIT PHP Active, pushed 11 days ago
2. 2
   Nebula-sync lovelaze

   Synchronize configuration of multiple Pi-hole v6.x instances.

   Developer tool Usable You run two or more Pi-hole v6 servers for redundancy and want their settings kept identical.

   ★ 1.7k MIT Go Active, pushed 2 days ago

Lists, courses and other material 2

1. 1
   A-dove-is-dumb ignaciocastro

   Easily block Adobe telemetry checking domains. Continuously Updated. Useful for HostsMan / SwitchHosts / Pi-hole users ✨

   List, course or other material Usable You want to stop Adobe apps calling home from a machine or network you control.

   ★ 1.9k BSD-2-Clause Active, pushed 5 days ago
2. 2
   Neodevhost neodevpro

   The Powerful Friendly Uptodate AD Blocking Hosts 最新强大而友善的去广告

   List, course or other material Usable You want a broad blocklist with good coverage of Chinese ad domains for Pi-hole, AdGuard or a router.

   ★ 1.4k MIT Adblock Filter List Active, pushed today

All 30 open-source network ad blocking projects

Compared head to head

Looking for an alternative to

Open-source licenses

• Permissive: 23. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
• Strong copyleft: 5. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
• Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
• Network copyleft: 1. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.

Languages

Go 4, TypeScript 3, C++ 2, JavaScript 2, Dockerfile 2, C# 1, Kotlin 1, PHP 1, Adblock Filter List 1, Shell 1, Python 1, Swift 1, CSS 1, Vue 1 and Rust 1.