Pihole is most popular among self holsters. It has nice GUI, it’s capable and its solid. It’s basic in sense of DNS features. You need to use config files to customize from terminal and even then it’s limited.
Adguard in my experience has more advanced blocking features. DNS also allows you little more flexibility like wildcard records. You can have separate config for different clients (like guest/kids network blocking)
NextDNS is SaaS only. It has most advanced blocking features but free account only gets you limited queries monthly. You can choose to keep your logs on specific servers or not to keep at all… from privacy perspective it’s arguably worse because you have to trust another company but it’s a good middle ground. Self hosted still needs upstream DNS but it could be tunneled through VPN which would anonymize traffic. NextDNS is upstream dns and it can’t distinguish internal network source.
I would throw zenarmor to the mix https://www.zenarmor.com/. Paid home license costs 10$/month and allows 3 different profiles. It is more advanced as it sniffs all network packets and not only DNS. It’s not replacing dns. It has great reports/dashboards.
For best DNS capabilities I would recommend technitium https://technitium.com/dns/. It’s free. You have gui, dns blocking and full DNS capability with some advanced plugins. It’s not as fancy for dashboards like pihole or Adguard.
You would use combination of solutions and nextDNS could be your upstream if you don’t mind paying them. If privacy is your thing you want to have more generic upstream that everyone uses like quad9.
If you want to look into enterprise grade equipment I recommend Ruckus with unleashed firmware. You can get older models r510 r610 from eBay for around 100-150 then flash unleashed by downloading it from official ruckus website. R610 requires more power so if you do PoE you need a switch that supports 802.3at 30w. R510 is less power hungry and suites most setups. You can do all sorts of network configurations with them. Meshing with other ruckus unleashed is supported. Guest portal, VLANs and client isolation. They are not the newest and don’t support wifi6 but are rock solid, support hundreds of devices and perform well in high congestion places. There are newer models but they are expensive r550 and r650. I used to recommend ubiquity equipment in the past but they are not the best for privacy focused deployment. Arguably the hardware of ubiquity AP’s are far inferior to enterprise gear like Ruckus or Aruba.
If terrain is mostly flat and your antenna is somehow elevated you should be good. If you have more friends in neighborhood it will help as every radio relays messages in mesh by default. Ideal setup would be to have base station at home (terminal) and a handheld device connected to your mobile phone. So 2 devices per person. This way it’s more reliable. If you have HAM license you can use higher power device like this G1 https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/station-g1/ The only thing is that you can’t legally use encryption with higher power transmission. In my experience the reliability of this setup varies. It works when users actively maintain and check Meshtastic app. If you have less technical users or users that just want things to work all the time, it may not be the best solution. I found sometimes radios disconnect from Bluetooth, specially when charging. Radio works but Bluetooth connection isn’t established. If you send message it will be received by radio and ACK’ed but person will not get it until connects to Meshtastic app and reestablish Bluetooth connection. Messages are visible on radio if they have display and are not in relay mode. This means that you don’t know for sure if message was read. For day to day use in normal urban setting I find it little finicky and not reliable enough. You have to carry additional device with you and antenna needs to be in good position. Some radios have built in antennas optimized for on body carry. This is just my experience and it will vary on people and situation. There is Nano explorer radio with dedicated notification bell that could be useful https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/Nano Series/
This solution works best if you don’t have cellphone network reception and all users are actively checking status of their radios (charge, messages, connection to app). This fits perfect with recreational outdoor activities in remote areas. Search and rescue is very niche and unless you engage in such activities on regular basis it’s not something you need. It can also serve as a backup solution for emergencies (neighborhood watch/ prepping).
If you also considering Wi-Fi/intranet solution I recommend looking into Mikrotik wireless wire products. There is more equipment cost involved and it’s completely different use case as it’s stationary solution. https://mikrotik.com/products/group/60-ghz-products
Meshtastic allows to send text messages, sensor metrics and GPS coordinates to nodes in mesh. It’s like a walkie talkie but on steroids. Meshtastic have 2 components: 1 firmware, 2 software. You flash firmware onto device that’s compatible. You can then download software on your mobile phone (Android or iOS) there is also web UI that can be used on PC. You connect to the radio device using Bluetooth Wi-Fi or USB cable (depending on device some don’t have Wi-Fi but then they drain less power). Range varies vastly depending on many factors. Just like any radio device the antenna quality and position is everything. In practice if you have only 2 devices that are both mobile handheld by person the range will be depending on terrain about few miles. If you add another device the range and dependability improves. Meshtastic tries to send each message 3 times and if it doesn’t get ACK reply it will show message failed. You can setup radio to be a relay as well as store messages so that connecting nodes can still retrieve messages even when they originally missed the transmission. You can setup Jedi to be administered remotely (sending configuration through other radio).
Meshatastic supports encryption AES 128 and 256. The weakness is that if any of the radios where ever compromised adversary could get the key from the device and able to decrypt future communications. 100+ mile range can be achieved with terrain like elevated hill or mountain where there is line of sight. See docs https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/range-tests I’ve read some use balloons to improve range during events. Both methods require dedicated relay node. Currently there is a limit to how many nodes you can have in the mesh.
Yes! I have a split DNS setup with technitium using advanced forwarding plugin. You can set different upstream based on client IP or subnet. So this way you can send to vpn DNS to prevent leaking.
Also you can have multiple piholes (poor mans setup) and have each configured filtering for dedicated VLAN. For instance be more strict for guest kids and less on adults net. Adguard can do that without having to have many instances but then Adguard can’t forward traffic based on origin IP. You can make any kind of logic and send different clients to different upstreams. As far as I know only BIND provides this functionality through views but it’s more complicated setup and no lovely GUI. You can always send all traffic through tunnel but then some results may be not ideal if you will be detected to be in different country and content will be served in other language. I think results will vary based on VPN endpoint. You don’t need to tunnel through vpn if you use DNS over https. It’s completely invisible to the ISP. VPN is more of a use case if you want to be consistent with your exit IP and DNS queries.