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.