[LikeBeans]

I think both are great. It depends on what you need and the requirements you want to hit. I use an RPi for as a Pi-Hole for example. It works great. Low power and just that one task. Performs nicely. And cheap. However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it. Also works great for that task. So I think of it in terms of 'task' and it's footprint (ie storage/mem) and throughput.

[giantg2]

You can't run a DNS server on the same mini PC? Seems like that would be ideal.

I run PiHole on a Pi Zero, which isn't really comparable to any mini PC in cost or performance. It uses such little resources that I'm surprised that most new routers don't offer the DNS filtering features out of the box these days.

[p_ing]

Pi-Hole specifically has a limited number of officially supported OSes - https://docs.pi-hole.net/main/prerequisites/. PfSense/Opnsense run on top of FreeBSD which is not supported by Pi-Hole.

I assume this is true of pfSense, but Opnsense has a number of available DNS server options built into the distribution.

[giantg2]

Yeah, thats why I asked about a DNS server running on there and not just a PiHole. Is there any reason to perfer PiHole over the Opnsense options?

[geerlingguy]

Pi-hole is a little easier for someone who's not into networking to deploy. I would give a beginner Pi-hole much sooner than I would introduce them to OPNsense. (I run both, OPNsense for my studio network, and Pi-hole + Asuswrt-merlin for my homelab)

[dizhn]

I installed pihole once. Not a fan. Since then I've been using Adguard Home. It's a single go binary so it would work fine on pfsense/opnsense either directly or in a jail.

[danparsonson]

I run Proxmox on an MSI N100 machine hosting opnSense in a VM and PiHole in a container; works really nicely.

[voxadam]

> However for my firewall (PfSense) I use a mini PC because I want the throughput especially when I VPN into it.

Plus, neither pfSense nor OPNsense run on Arm or any non-x86 system.