For the past few years I have been running a Pi-hole instance on my home network because I want to have a modicum of privacy without being tracked and spied on by various adware companies. What I like about it is that it works on all devices on my network without having to setup adblockers on each one of them. The disadvantage of it though is that without setting up a vpn or Tailscale to my home network whenever I am away from it I lose all of that.

And that’s where I found NextDNS while researching some Reddit threads about Pi-hole and Adguard. It works in a very similar way to them by blocking ads at the DNS level. I like that it has support and documentation for all major mobile and desktop OSs, and it supports various DNS methods:

  • DNS-over-TLS, it will looks something like 123abcd.dns.nextdns.io
  • DNS-over-HTTPS, it will looks something like https://dns.nextdns.io/123abcd
  • IPv6
  • if neither of the above work, you also can set via IPv4, they give you a couple of their DNS servers IPs and you can link your IP in their interface to have an overview of what’s been blocked

You can manually add domains or subdomains to be either whitelisted or blacklisted, if you find that you want to access some blocked sites or want to deny them. And account setup is very easy, you can get a trial config for a week without setting any accounts, they have a quite reasonable free plan and their pro plans are just $1.99 per month. So I think if you don’t want to manage your own Pi-hole or setup adblockers on your mobile devices it is a good alternative and I recommend them so far.