If you search for a Pi-hole alternative, you will find plenty of comparisons written by people who have clearly never run either tool. This one is different in two ways: EliHole is the younger project and we say so plainly, and Pi-hole wins several rows in the table below. Pi-hole has earned roughly a decade of trust, and pretending otherwise would insult both projects.
The one-paragraph version: EliHole is an open-source, self-hosted DNS sinkhole built on Elixir/Phoenix. It serves DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS natively, validates the full DNSSEC chain of trust itself, and clusters out of the box. Pi-hole counters with ten years of maturity, a built-in DHCP server, per-client blocking groups, and a C engine lean enough for a Raspberry Pi Zero. Neither is strictly better. They optimize for different things.
Feature comparison table
| Feature | EliHole | Pi-hole |
|---|---|---|
| Ad/tracker blocking (exact, wildcard, regex) | Yes | Yes |
| Adlist sync (Pi-hole-compatible format) | Yes, 24h auto-update | Yes (gravity) |
| Deep CNAME inspection | Yes | Yes |
| DNS-over-HTTPS server (RFC 8484) | Built in, at /dns-query | No — needs external proxy |
| DNS-over-TLS server (RFC 7858) | Built in, port 853 | No — needs external proxy |
| DNSSEC validation | Full chain-of-trust, enforced (SERVFAIL on bogus) | Delegated to dnsmasq/upstream |
| Clustering / HA | Native master-slave | None native; third-party scripts |
| Parallel upstream racing | Yes, fastest answer wins | No |
| Prometheus metrics | Native /metrics + /api/health | Third-party exporter |
| Query log persistence | Postgres, 30-day retention | SQLite long-term database |
| DHCP server | No | Yes, built in |
| Per-client blocking groups | No | Yes |
| Runs on Pi Zero / low-end hardware | No (~512 MB RAM + Postgres) | Yes |
| Database dependency | Postgres required | SQLite, embedded |
| Maturity and community | Young project | ~10 years, huge community |
| Pi-hole Teleporter import | Yes | — |
Where EliHole pulls ahead
Encrypted DNS without a sidecar
EliHole ships a built-in DNS-over-HTTPS server (RFC 8484, GET and POST at /dns-query) and a DNS-over-TLS server (RFC 7858, port 853) — no proxy, no extra container, no separate service to babysit.
Pi-hole has no native DoH or DoT support and has historically relied on cloudflared as a local proxy. That path is now closing: Pi-hole’s own documentation marks the cloudflared guide as deprecated, noting that cloudflared releases after February 2, 2026 no longer work with the proxy-dns setup the guide depends on. Existing installs keep working for a while, but the official recommendation is to stop building new ones. If you are in that position today, we wrote up the situation and your options in Pi-hole DoH without cloudflared.
This matters beyond convenience. Encrypted DNS between your devices and your sinkhole stops anyone on the local network — or a guest Wi-Fi snoop — from reading or rewriting your queries. Having it built into the resolver means one fewer moving part that can silently break after an update.
DNSSEC that actually fails closed
EliHole validates the full DNSSEC chain of trust from the ICANN root and records a per-query verdict — secure, insecure, or bogus — in the query log. In enforcement mode it returns SERVFAIL on bogus responses and sets the AD bit on validated ones, with NSEC/NSEC3 denial-of-existence checks as an anti-downgrade defense. Pi-hole, by contrast, delegates DNSSEC validation to its embedded dnsmasq and the upstream resolver rather than validating the chain itself.
Pi-hole’s approach is not wrong — trusting a validating upstream like Quad9 is a reasonable stance. But if you want validation to happen on hardware you control, with a visible verdict per query, EliHole does that work locally.
Clustering you don’t have to script
EliHole clusters natively in a master-slave topology: configuration pushes to slaves with a 3-second debounce, stats aggregate back to the master every 30 seconds, and new nodes auto-register with health monitoring. Run two instances, point your DHCP at both, and a dead node stops being an outage.
Pi-hole has no native clustering. The community answer for years was gravity-sync, which is now archived and unmaintained; the remaining options are keepalived plus hand-rolled scripts or third-party syncers. They work, but you own the glue, and config drift between instances is on you to detect.
Speed and observability
Two smaller wins worth a paragraph each. First, race resolution: EliHole queries two upstreams in parallel and returns the fastest answer, weighting future upstream selection by tracked latency. Pi-hole forwards to upstreams sequentially based on dnsmasq’s behavior. In practice this shaves tail latency on cache misses — the queries you actually feel.
Second, monitoring: EliHole exposes a native Prometheus /metrics endpoint and a /api/health JSON endpoint. Pi-hole needs a third-party exporter (commonly eko/pihole-exporter) to get into a Grafana dashboard. Again, workable — but it is one more component tracking someone else’s API changes.
Where Pi-hole wins
This section exists because comparisons that declare a sweep are lying to you. Pi-hole is genuinely better at several things, and for many networks these things decide the choice.
Maturity. Pi-hole has roughly ten years of production history, a huge community, and an FTL engine written in C that has been battle-tested at every scale from a dorm room to small ISPs. EliHole is young. It is honest about that — but honesty does not buy you a decade of edge cases already found and fixed. If your tolerance for surprises is zero, the older project is the safer bet.
Built-in DHCP. Pi-hole includes a full DHCP server, which is the cleanest way to get per-device hostnames in your query log and to take over from a locked-down ISP router. EliHole has no DHCP server at all. If you need your sinkhole to also hand out leases, Pi-hole wins this row outright.
Client groups. Pi-hole lets you assign clients to groups with different blocking policies — strict lists for the kids’ tablets, looser ones for the work laptop. EliHole has nothing comparable yet; blocking policy is instance-wide. For households that depend on per-client rules, this alone settles it.
Footprint. Pi-hole’s FTL is extremely lean and runs happily on a Raspberry Pi Zero with SQLite embedded. EliHole runs on the BEAM VM, needs Postgres, and is comfortable at around 512 MB of RAM at runtime — and building the release image needs more than 1 GB, so low-RAM hosts should pull a prebuilt image (covered in the Docker install guide). The BEAM buys OTP supervision and fault tolerance, but it does not fit on a Pi Zero.
Ecosystem. Countless guides, Home Assistant integrations, mobile apps, and third-party tools assume Pi-hole. Whatever you want to bolt on, someone has documented it. EliHole’s ecosystem is a fraction of that today.
What both do equally well
A fair comparison also names the ties. Both projects perform deep CNAME inspection — blocking clean-looking domains whose CNAME chain resolves to a blocked target — and in both, the whitelist overrides the block decision. Both support per-client rate limiting (EliHole answers REFUSED before doing any upstream work; it ships off by default, while dnsmasq’s limits are tunable in Pi-hole). And both handle the core job — exact, wildcard, and regex blocking fed by subscribable adlists — with feature parity close enough that you will not notice a difference in day-to-day blocking quality.
EliHole also keeps query history in Postgres with 30-day retention and today/7d/30d long-term stats, surviving restarts; Pi-hole’s long-term SQLite database does the equivalent job. Call it a draw with different storage engines.
Which should you choose
Choose Pi-hole if any of these apply:
- You run on a Pi Zero or similarly constrained hardware.
- You need the sinkhole to also be your DHCP server.
- You need per-client blocking groups.
- You want the largest possible community and the most battle-tested codebase, and built-in encrypted DNS is not a requirement.
Choose EliHole if these matter more:
- You want DoH and DoT served natively, with no proxy sidecar — especially now that the cloudflared path is deprecated.
- You want full DNSSEC validation enforced locally, with a per-query verdict you can audit.
- You want two or more instances that stay in sync without third-party scripts.
- You want native Prometheus metrics and a real-time dashboard, and you are comfortable running Postgres.
If you are leaning toward trying EliHole, the switch is low-risk: it imports your Pi-hole Teleporter backup natively, so adlists, whitelist, and local DNS records come with you, and Pi-hole keeps running until you flip your DHCP’s DNS option. The migration guide walks through the whole process step by step, including how to run both side by side while you compare query logs.