 After recently doing a video on PF BlockerNG, 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 Pyhole or PF BlockerNG. You just saw some posts on Reddit. Another post on Reddit, can PF Blocker replace with Pyhole or PF BlockerNG versus Pyhole or all the people commenting on my YouTube, same question, all right. Let's define the two projects very quickly. Pyhole, network-wide, add blocking a black hole for the internet advertisement. So PF Blocker and Pyhole do a similar service. They work as well, Pyhole 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 Pyhole system does is DNS blacklisting or sink-holding of a site. So it creates a black hole, hence the reason kind of like a black hole looking thing behind here and calling it Pyhole. And you're basically going through and saying, all right, 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 Pyhole as your DNS server. And so here, this is an example and some type of router, probably a consumer router reminds me of the old Linksys one. I think this was screen shot is from you go to your DHCP servers, you build your separate device, the Pyhole 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 a nice little system. I like it. It's cool. But it's not necessary with PF Blocker. Here's the PF Blocker project. Now there's different prerequisites for PF Blocker. First one is you got to have a PF Sensebox. PF Blocker 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 Pyhole. It's using different lists that you have on the internet and you can say, hey, I want these things to be black holes, sink holes, and like in the screen shot they have here, settings.windata, that's the Microsoft Telemetry server. Maybe you want a black hole that, well, you do that with PF Blocker. Now PF Blocker is not itself a DNS server, but PF Sense has a DNS server built into it. This is an add-on. It works within the DNS server of PF Sense. So in that respect, they're the same. So there's not a need to run both. For me, and 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 sinkhole 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 sinkhole 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, GOIP blocking and you can say block 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 going to see rules such as these. It's a PFB for PF Blocker, top four, and some of the GOIP blocking. And now we've created firewall rules in addition. Now to me, like I said, PF Blocker is something more advanced than Pyhole. It is a system that's doing both DNS and IP filtering and creating firewall rules dynamically based on the list 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 Pyhole. 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 links this router, you don't plan it upgrading any of your, you know, really basic routing, you're not going to go to PF Sense, then Pyhole makes perfect sense to use it as your DNS server internally so you can sync all things. But if you want to go with something like PF Sense, which I'm, 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 of the latest version of PF Blocker, 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 PF Sense NetGate 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 poor quality as I can describe with some of the consumer firewalls, especially if you're so running one of those really old links as firewalls. So it's not really a if, of this, that, or I can't really come up with a use case to run both unless you like the reporting in Pyhole better because you like the way the graphs look at it. I haven't looked at the Pyhole 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 Pyhole 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 going to do anything different because, well, they're the same feedless and any of these are only as good as the feedless that you put in there and all of the tuning or all the headache of either, you know, blacklisting certain sites or having to go back and whitelist certain sites because you've 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 or 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 PF 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, 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 a whole path and buy a whole separate system and build a separate piehole to find out that it was just a quick plug-in in PF Sense 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'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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