The Best Ad-blocker Software for Android, iOS, PC and Mac

AdLock is one of the best ad-blockers currently on the market in terms of functionality and advertising/tracking blocking and analytics. While there's no free tier, it offers a variety of reasonably priced subscription options, allowing you to pay month-by-month, for one year, or for five years.

It’s a little more intensive on resources than browser-based alternatives for mobile, but as a separate application, it can prevent auto-playing videos, pop-ups, and general advertisements mobile-wide and offers detailed stats to allow users to delve into what ads, trackers and suspicious activities are being blocked.

In-depth information

If you've ever wanted to see exactly who and what is trying to serve you ads and trackers as you browse the internet, then AdLock is a great choice. From basic statistics showing you which URLs are being blocked, reports on suspicious requests, intrusion attempts and more, AdLock allows you near total control of what is, and isn't, allowed on your machine.

The only minor complaint here is that these features might be a little intimidating to new users, but you don't actually need to use any of them. Just turn AdLock on, make sure to hit that "Check for updates" button every now and again, and it'll just get on with things in the background.

Massive customization

AdLock offers protection on a per-app basis, allowing you to add and remove browsers and other programs as well as choose whether you wish to apply filters. You can even block an app entirely from the internet if you think it's being used just to serve you adverts. Where AdLock truly shines is that you can use it to block ads in all manner of apps, not just web browsers. Candy Crush showing you too many ads? Block them. Being forced to watch 20 seconds of adverts for a 2 minute long YouTube video? Not anymore. Simply add the app into AdLock and kiss goodbye to adverts.

Responsive support

You can reach out to AdLock support through the browser or directly through the app. This is how you engage their support team if you find any sites that AdLock does not work with. We reached out to their support when we found two sites that didn't work during our testing and in less than ninety minutes, they'd released an updated filter list that enabled both sites to work flawlessly. If this is the level of support all AdLock users can expect, then we are genuinely impressed and we think you will be too if you try it out risk-free with its 30 day money-back guarantee.

uBlock Origin (uBO) is a popular free and Open-source cross-platform ad-blocker that also has some quite effective anti-tracking capabilities. uBlock Origin is a fork of the original uBlock, so don't get the two mixed up! The original uBlock is now part of Adblock Plus and takes part in the whitelisting of some adverts, so if you're looking to block as many as you can, then make sure you get uBlock Origin.

Feature heavy

uBlock Origin is an unobtrusive, lightweight offering compared to some competitors, but that doesn't mean it's bringing a wiffle bat to a knife fight. It's got custom blocklists, dynamic filtering, element inspector and zapper so you can block specific parts of a website, site-specific pop-up blocking and even the ability to whitelists sites that you want to support directly or where the adverts aren't too intrusive.

Block pre-fetched links

These days, most browsers try to speed up the browsing experience by preloading the other links on a page while you are busy reading that page, whether you have any intention of clicking on them or not. Not only does this waste bandwidth unnecessarily, if you are not using a VPN to hide your IP address from these pre-fetched pages, it further exposes your personal details to these sites without you ever visiting them. Fortunately, this is an issue that uBlock Origin can fix.

Malware protection

Besides advertising block lists, uBlock Origin also uses lists of known malware distributors to automatically blocks those for you as well! All of uBlock's block lists are further maintained by a community of volunteers, no compromises made to whitelist certain sites, and no worries that it might be doing something nefarious with your data.

NordVPN's CyberSec option isn't free like some of the other options on this list, as part of a NordVPN subscription, but it's still a compelling offering, especially when bundled with an industry leading VPN to further secure your connection and online privacy. While it lacks in-depth customization options, literally being either ON or OFF, it still offers a good level of protection against all kinds of malware.

Foolproof functionality

While perhaps lacking the functionality that power-users will crave, NordVPN's CyberSec is a great way for novice users to further secure their internet connection. With no configuration needed, users can simply turn it on and leave it running in the background, confident that NordVPN has their backs and will be actively protecting them from malicious sites, ransomware and more.

Blocking malicious websites

CyberSec, and other security products, use filter lists of dangerous/suspicious websites to identify potential threats as you browse the internet. It scans any address you enter against these lists and, if it finds a match, it will block access to that site before you can connect to it. In this way, it ensures you cannot accidentally browse to any sites known to host malware.

A little too simple

Really, the only reason not to recommend this product is that it's all-or-nothing, on or off, there's no way to customize it, no way to set up your own filters to avoid specific sites or even to work around potential false-flags which do happen from time to time. That said, it's a useful tool if you already have a NordVPN subscription and a great way for the non-technical to further secure themselves online.

While AdFender no longer offers a free option as of version 2.50, it remains one of the best ad blockers for Windows PC users, offering official support right up to Windows 10. It's one of the cheaper paid ad-blockers out there, available for as little as $15.95 per year. It has been tried and tested using a wide range of browsers, including Waterfox and Pale Moon, two of the more privacy-focused browser offerings out there.

HTTPS filtering

Similar to AdLock, AdFender works by running as a proxy server on your PC to filter out potentially dangerous content. It filters all the web traffic from your machine, and if it detects that the URL that's trying to load is one that's used to serve adverts, it blocks it. It's even cable of filtering secure HTTPS connections and helping to anonymize your online presence by routing all your traffic through the Tor network, though this will hurt your connection speeds, as Tor is not known for being particularly fast.

Browsers and more

As with AdLock, AdFender is installed on the operating system rather than just as an extension in your browser, so it can protect more than just your web browsing. As well as sporting an impressive list of supported browsers that includes not only the big, well-known ones, but all kinds of smaller, niche browsers as well including Yandex, Epic and more.

It can also work with various instant messaging clients and more. It does all this without having a major impact on your system resources too.

Better browsing

AdFender helps not only speed up your browsing experience, webpages load faster when they don't need to waste time loading intrusive banner and video ads, but it saves you bandwidth as well. By automatically detecting and rejecting advertising URL requests, it protects people on metered connections from frittering away their precious download allowance on potentially malicious adverts.

1Blocker (formerly 1Blocker X) was one of the first ad-blockers for iOS devices such as iPads and iPhones, and remains a popular and effective choice for Apple users. While it is limited to only blocking adverts in the Safari browser, it does it very well and is still a useful tool for saving both system resources and bandwidth by preventing content from downloading in advance. It does have a free tier, but the paid version requires only a small onetime payment to unlock all its features and filtering options.

Better browsing

It would be unfair to call 1Blocker "just" an ad-blocker. It's capable of blocking not only unwanted ads, but all manner of social media trackers, all those widgets for sharing content on multiple platforms, and it can even block custom fonts which can be a help to those who have dyslexia. One of the most interesting options is the ability to block those oh-so-annoying "here's how we use cookies" banners that have been a pox on the internet since the introduction of the EU's ePrivacy Directive in 2018.

Tracker blocking

A recent update to 1Blocker has seen it expand its tracker-blocking functionality outside of just the browser. Sadly, there's still no system level ad-blocking, but now you can block all those pesky social media trackers in other apps as well as just Safari. Building on 1Blocker's App Tracking Transparency, which forces apps to ask for permission before they track you, Firewall now just automatically blocks the trackers, adding another layer of privacy and security between you and companies eager to track everything you do online.

Fully customizable

Out of the box, 1Blocker is already a solid choice for an ad-blocker, but it builds on this foundation by providing the functionality to create custom rules. It will allow you to create your own custom filters to block any URL you like by using a regular expression, or hide any element in CSS. However, this feature is only available to paid users otherwise you're stuck with just the default filters, which are still nothing to sneeze at as these are kept regularly updated by 1Blocker.

Adblock Plus, otherwise known as ABP, is one of the oldest extensions around. Unfortunately, the extension has received criticism in recent years for its ‘Acceptable Ads’ scheme, allowing some paying advertisers to slip through onto a whitelist. This option can be turned off in the options, but given that this is a conflict of interest and there are better, more private services out there, it didn’t quite make our official list.

Easy install

Getting Adblock Plus set up is a breeze, with a simple install process from either the Apple App store, Google Play Store or from your web browser of choice. It will run on pretty much any mobile or desktop PC platform as well as most major web browsers including Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Yandex. Browser and more and it's a lightweight option, with almost no impact on system resources, making it a good choice for folks on older, slower devices.

Custom filters

Adblock Plus comes with some filter lists pre-set. As well as the Acceptable Ads filter list, Adblock Plus uses the EasyList filter, which is also used by many other ad-blocking products. It also offers a highly customizable filter functionality that you can set up yourself. There's domain blocking, header filtering, support for regular expressions and more. It offers a truly impressive level of options for tech-savvy users to drill down and block not only sites, but individual elements on a page.

Acceptable Ads

The biggest controversy surrounding Adblock Plus was their decision to partner with advertisers to show what they consider to be "acceptable advertising", which is adverts that are non-intrusive and won't interfere with your browsing or reading experience. While this feature can be disabled it still proved to be a highly controversial choice when it was first introduced.

If bandwidth isn't an issue for you, and you want to support sites you like by allowing them to show adverts, then this may not be a deal breaker for you but we feel there are still other better options out there.