Love NextDNS and it is my current choice, but it appears that the big difference between the two is that NextDNS does not provide a way to self-host the DNS server.
That's true, but functionally NextDNS also has several features AdGuardHome does not that made me switch even though I'd prefer a self-hosted solution all else being equal.
AdGuardHome (and pi-hole) work almost entirely on domain blocklists they regularly download from configurable sources (AdGuardHome also incorporates Google safe browsing). This blocks a lot of stuff, but NextDNS also has options like blocking typo squatting, newly registered domains, domains that are created by domain generation algorithms, and whatever their "AI-driven threat detection" feature is doing. It's hard to tell how useful those features are and there's no reason blocklists couldn't incorporate all those kinds of things. But I have no idea if they do, and outsourcing putting all that together to a service like NextDNS seems like a better solution than a locally hosted option that relies on a user figuring out the right blocklists to use. Although NextDNS also allows you to play with blocklists if you want.
While true, you can run nextDNS CLI locally and have the same performance as if you’re hosting your pihole/adguard home locally. I run it directly off my Ubiquti switch and redirect all DNS request to it.
looks like it proxies standard DNS traffic to NextDNS via DOH, and does some other fancy stuff including caching, zeroconf discovery, and conditional forwarding.
Dang, this looks like a nice option for my home setup - I may give it a try!!
I'm running the same setup you are, but the primary DNS servers are still pointing to nextdns rather than being fully local. I'm extremely happy with it, and any latency/speed difference is negligible anyways.
For me that’s a benefit. It’s extremely configurable for a hosted solution and since DNS is critical I prefer it now after having a few showstoppers with self-hosted DNS.
Nothing major but annoying to have to deal with everything being broken because of maintenance or whatever else.
I looked into nextdns and compared dns traffic on my adguard. My current usage would overshoot the free tier, and having another subscription but for dns doesn’t sound so fun
