Which one is better and the difference between Pi-Hole and pfBlockerNG

after recently doing a video on P up Locker ng I realized a lot of people are a little confused and I'm making this video to clear this up because they're always asking pie hole or PF blocker ng just saw some posts on Reddit another post on reddit can PF blocker replaced with a pie hole or RPF blocker and G vs. pie hole or all the people commenting on my youtube seem question alright let's define the two projects very quickly pie hole Network wide ad blocking a black hole for the internet advertisement so PF blocker and piyo will do a similar service they work as well pile specifically works as an external DNS server so you have your router which frequently in most home networks would be serving up the DNS or you use an external DNS server as for name resolution for websites what the pie whole system does is DNS blacklisting or sync holing of a site so it creates a black hole hence the reason kind of like a black hole lookin thing behind here in calling it pie hole and you're basically going through and saying are these are sites I don't want to resolve in my browser because they track me or I just don't want to see them therefore they go away this requires that when you set this up when you configure this that you use pie hole as your DNS server and so here this is an example in some type of router probably a consumer router it reminds me of the old links this one I think that's what screenshot is from you go to your DCP servers you build your separate device the pie hole and it will run on a Raspberry Pi and sits namesake and you plug in the DNS settings for it as this to be your server cool awesome it's it's a nice little system I like it it's cool but it's not necessary with PF blocker here's the PF locker project now there's different prerequisites for PF blocker first one is you got to have a PF sense box PS Locker is an add-on for PF sense it's a package that you load the feed system and everything is the same as it is for pie hole it's using different lists that you have any internet and you can say hey I want these things to be black hold sync hold and like in the screenshot they have here settings that when data that's the Microsoft telemetry server maybe you want a black hole that well you do that with P up Locker now PF Locker is not itself a DNS server but he have sense hey a DNS server builds into it this is an add-on it works within the DNS server of PSN so in that respect they're the same so there's not a need to run both and for me in my opinion on this is that it's more convenient if I'm already running PF sense to run PF blocker and problem solved it's doing the same things I can go here I can update the list I can add feeds and sync whole different things but PF blocker also has an advantage of not just being a separate device that you have to manage or change dns servers because you still leave PF sense as your DNS server this is just an add-on to sync oh those this also does IP blocking and creating firewall rules so this is where PF blocker goes beyond so you have the same functionality of DNS and the extended functionality of working with the firewall to do blocking of sites and feeds so you can go here and we'll use for example geo ap blocking and you can say blocking these domains now this is doing it at the firewall level not the DNS level so the IP addresses themselves become unreachable whether they're inbound or outbound because it supports both and this is like I said working in conjunction with the firewall this is not a firewall on top of a firewall this is just rule sets being built inside the firewall itself therefore you're gonna see rules such as these I say you know pfb for PF blocker top 4 and some of the Geo IP blocking and now we've created firewall rules in addition now to me like I said PF blocker is something more advanced than piehole it is a system that's doing both DNS and IP filtering and creating firewall rules dynamically based on lists that get load and showing you what the states and things that are blocked are so it's a much more advanced system compared to the simplicity of piehole but for some people if they're just running a basic and like the screenshot was here you're going through and you have a Linksys router you don't plan on upgrading any of your you know really basic routing you're not going to go to PF sense then piehole makes perfect sense to use it as your DNS server internally so you can sync whole things but if you want to go with something like PF sense you know obviously a fan of that firewall and you use this as an add-on now you've gone a step further and also you don't have to have two separate devices all of it can be done in one device and in the video demo I did recently a lilius version of PF blocker I just linked I'll link leave a link to that down below it is fully supported and runs quite well here in 2019 on an SG 1100 which is one of the you know relatively inexpensive pfsense net gate appliances and it kind of makes one nice small turnkey solution for a lot of home users to be able to have all these advanced features all in one box and not have to deal with you know the the poor quality is all I can describe some of the consumer firewalls especially if you're still running one of those really old links as firewalls so it's not really if of this that or I can't really come up with a use case to run both unless you like the reporting in PI whole better because you like the way the graphs look in it I haven't looked at the PI whole project in a while since I did a video on it almost I think two years ago I think it's a great project but it's you know not it's redundant to run PF blocker and pie hole at the same time so it's just kind of a futile effort at that point so there's not really any advantage if unless you're trying to run different lists and you want to see if one misses but the reality is you run the same list they're not gonna do anything different because well there's the same feed list and any of these are only as good as the feed lists that you put in there and all the tuning or all the headache of either you know black listing certain sites who are having to go back and waitlist certain sites because you broke some functionality that you need of sites you can't get to all of that is going to occur on either one of them because that's more based on the list than the device for methodology used to do it so hopefully this clears that up real quick about the difference between them that there's really not a lot other than P a blocker does more they both do the same ad blocking they both do it based on lists and they both are going to have the same challenges if you make those lists too restrictive of having to remove the remove things and put them back on whitelist to gain functionality so hopefully that cleared things up and hopefully people find this and it's a shorter question before they go through and start down the whole path and buy a whole separate system and build a separate PI whole to find out that it was just a quick plug in and pfSense that they're already using all right Thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content for the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to lawrence systems comm fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion hetero 2 forums that lawrence systems comm where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel on other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 142,903

Keywords: pfBlockerNG, pihole, pihole linux, pihole docker, raspberry pi, pi-hole, ad blocker, ad blocking, pfblockerng-devel, pfblockerng vs pihole, pfblockerng geoip, pfblockerng dnsbl, pfblockerng whitelist, pfblockerng setup guide, pfblockerng easylist, pfblockerng pihole, pfsense, firewall, pfblocker, router, tutorial

Id: 6wToQrcvkF8

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019