Why Look for a Pi-hole Alternative on a Mac

Pi-hole is a good answer to a real problem, and most people searching for an alternative are not unhappy with it. They have run into one of its requirements. It needs a host, that host needs to stay powered on, and every device you care about has to be pointed at it.

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  No spare hardware: you would rather not buy a Raspberry Pi or leave a machine running around the clock

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  Setup and upkeep: a resolver on your network is another service to configure, update, and repair when the network stops resolving names

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  One machine is the actual goal: you want your Mac filtered, not the smart TV and the guest phones

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  Blocking that travels: a resolver at home stops filtering the moment the laptop leaves the house

What Pi-hole Does

Pi-hole is network-wide DNS filtering that you host yourself, most often on a Raspberry Pi sitting on your home network. Devices use it as their resolver, and names on the blocklists you enable stop resolving for them. Anything pointed at it is covered, whatever the device is and whether or not it can run software of its own.

That is the whole point of the design. It is also where the requirements come from: something has to host the service, the host has to stay awake, and the devices have to keep using it.

When Pi-hole Is the Better Choice

Worth saying plainly before anything else. For a good number of setups Pi-hole is the right tool and a Mac app is not.

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  You want every device covered: phones, tablets, smart TVs, consoles, and whatever a guest connects to your Wi-Fi

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  You already run a NAS, home server, or spare machine, so hosting it costs you no new hardware and no new habits

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  You want one dashboard and one query log for the whole household, in a single place

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  You need to allow individual domains when a list blocks something you use. SplitTunnel's curated lists are on or off, and individual domains can't be excluded in this version

If two or more of those describe you, run Pi-hole. The rest of this guide is for the case where they do not.

The Per-Device Version of the Same Idea

SplitTunnel works at the same layer, in a different place. It handles your Mac's DNS lookups, and a name on a curated list or in your own rules simply stops resolving, so the connection is never made.

Because it works at the DNS layer rather than inside a browser, a rule covers every app and every browser on the Mac, no matter how each app's traffic is routed. An extension only ever covers its own browser. A rule here covers the chat client, the launcher, the menu bar utility, and Safari at the same time.

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  Curated lists: two switches, Block Ads and Trackers, and Block Malware and Scams. The lists come from the HaGeZi project and are refreshed daily

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  Your own rules: add any hostname yourself, and a rule on a hostname also covers anything underneath it

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  Local processing: lookups are processed locally on your Mac, and your queries are not sent anywhere to be classified

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  Survives restarts: rules and list settings come back on their own after a reboot

What Changes When the Blocker Is the Mac

Two practical differences, one in each direction. The first is that the blocking travels. A resolver on your home network filters only while a device is actually using it, so a laptop at a coffee shop, in an office, or on hotel Wi-Fi is unfiltered until it comes home. Blocking that runs on the Mac applies wherever the Mac is, and it applies whether an app's traffic is routed through your VPN or connects directly.

The second is that coverage stops at the Mac. Nothing else on your network changes. The phone, the TV, and the console keep resolving whatever they always did. If the goal was the household rather than the laptop, this is the wrong tool and Pi-hole is the right one.

Seeing Before Blocking

The awkward part of list-based blocking is deciding what to add beyond the lists. Pi-hole answers that with a query log for the network. SplitTunnel answers it per app: the Activity panel shows which app looked up which domain and where its connections are going, and a domain you are looking at becomes a rule from there.

Two honest limits go with that. Not every domain the curated lists catch appears as its own row in Activity in this version, and the curated lists do not take per-domain exceptions. Your own rules are the part you see and control one at a time.

In practice the two views answer different questions. A network query log tells you what your household is asking for in aggregate, which is the right view when you are tuning one resolver for many devices. Per-app attribution tells you which piece of software on this machine wanted a domain, which is the right view when you are deciding whether a rule will cost you something you use.

Set It Up on Your Mac

What the DNS Layer Covers

Setting expectations correctly matters more than the choice of tool, and the expectations are the same for both. DNS-layer blocking works on names. Anything served from a hostname you have not blocked carries on as before, which is why people who care about this usually run a content blocker in the browser as well. The two are complementary rather than competing, and that is as true of a Pi-hole as it is of a Mac app.

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  Good at: background telemetry, tracker endpoints, ad and malware domains, and anything an app contacts by name without asking you

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  Good at: coverage outside the browser, where extensions cannot reach

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  Not the tool for: things served from the same hostname as the content you wanted

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  Not the tool for: software that connects without looking a name up at all

The Ceiling Every DNS Blocker Shares

This one applies to Pi-hole, to a hosted filtering resolver, and to SplitTunnel in exactly the same way, so it is not a point against any of them. A browser or app that sends its lookups to its own encrypted-DNS (DoH) provider is not asking the system resolver anything, so it never sees the block.

SplitTunnel's response is Strict Mode. Turn on Block Encrypted DNS in Settings and Strict Mode blocks known encrypted-DNS resolvers, so software falls back to the system resolver where your rules apply. It works from a curated list of resolvers, which means it is not absolute: software hard-wired to one encrypted resolver stays out of reach. Every DNS-layer blocker has that same edge.

Other Roads to the Same Outcome

Two more options are worth knowing about before you decide. A filtering resolver in the cloud, such as NextDNS, moves the work to a service someone else runs: nothing to host, coverage on every device you configure, and your lookups answered off the Mac. AdGuard Home sits closer to Pi-hole, as a self-hosted network-wide server, if you have somewhere to host it. Guides comparing each of those with the on-Mac approach are linked below.

Which One Fits

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  Every device in the house, and you have somewhere to host it: Pi-hole

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  Every device, nothing to host, configuration that follows you between networks: a filtering resolver in the cloud

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  This Mac, no infrastructure, blocking that travels with the laptop: SplitTunnel

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  This Mac, plus control over which app gets the network at all: SplitTunnel, where domain rules and the per-app block are separate tools

If you are already running a Pi-hole and enjoying it, nothing here is an argument to tear it down. The case for a Mac app is narrower and more specific: you wanted one machine filtered, you did not want to become the person who maintains the household resolver, and you want the blocking to still be there when the laptop is on someone else's network.