Most people who go looking for an Adblock Plus alternative arrive with the same complaint: they installed an features" class="doc-internal-link">ad blocker, and ads are still there. Not on every site, not the worst ones, but enough to make you wonder whether it's working at all.

It is working. What you're seeing is a feature.

The thing nobody notices until they go looking

Adblock Plus ships with a programme called Acceptable Ads switched on by default. It permits ads that meet a published set of rules — static, clearly labelled, not interrupting the content, capped in size and placement. The idea is to let sites earn something without inflicting the auto-playing video and full-page takeovers that made people install a blocker in the first place.

Whether that's reasonable is a genuine argument. What's less arguable is the funding model behind it. eyeo, the company that makes Adblock Plus, charges larger participants a fee to be included in the allowlist. The fee applies to participants above roughly ten million monthly ad impressions — most participating publishers pay nothing — but it does mean some of the ads reaching you are ads a large advertiser paid to have reach you, through the tool you installed to stop that happening.

To be fair about it: the programme is disclosed, the criteria are public, an independent committee has governed the rules since 2017, and you can turn the whole thing off in Settings by unchecking "Allow Acceptable Ads". None of it is hidden. The complaint isn't deception — it's the default. A tool whose entire purpose is blocking ads arguably shouldn't start by allowing some.

So before you switch: try turning it off. If that fixes the thing that was bothering you, you've solved the problem without changing anything else, and the rest of this page is optional reading.

If turning it off wasn't enough

Two other things push people away from Adblock Plus, and neither is fixed by a checkbox.

It's heavier than it looks. ABP has been around since 2006 and carries a lot of accumulated functionality. On lower-end hardware and pages with many frames, that shows.

Filtering is less precise than the alternatives. ABP's filter syntax is capable, but uBlock Origin's is more expressive, and people who write their own rules tend to notice quickly.

What to switch to

uBlock Origin — if your browser still supports it

The honest first answer. It has never operated an allowlist programme, it's free with no paid tier and no company behind it selling anything, and it's the most efficient of the mainstream blockers.

The catch is availability. Chrome's move to Manifest V3 means Chrome and Edge users get uBlock Origin Lite, which is a different and narrower tool — no dynamic filtering, no per-site rule editing. The full version still runs on Firefox, and on Brave and Opera, which kept Manifest V2 support. We've written up which browsers still support it and what to use if yours doesn't.

If you're on Firefox, this is probably where you should stop reading.

AdGuard — if you want coverage beyond the browser

The browser extension is free and doesn't run an acceptable-ads programme. AdGuard's real strength is its desktop and mobile applications, which filter system-wide rather than only in the browser — the extension is the smaller part of what they do, and the applications are paid.

DNDShield — what we do differently

We should be clear that we're the ones writing this, so here's the specific, checkable difference rather than a pitch: there is no allowlist programme, no acceptable-ads tier, and no arrangement under which any advertiser can pay to reach you. There's nothing to switch off, because there's nothing switched on.

Beyond that, we're built on Manifest V3 natively rather than ported to it, which matters mainly because it means we're not working around a platform we were designed before. Filter rules come from AdGuard's lists, EasyList and EasyPrivacy, plus our own. And there's a dedicated pop-up guard that checks what you clicked rather than only that you clicked — the trick sites use to make a stray tap count as permission for a new window.

Where we're narrower: we're MV3, so we live under the same platform limits as uBlock Origin Lite does. If dynamic filtering is what you use ABP or uBO for, we don't replace it, and neither does anything else on Chrome. That's a limitation of the platform, not something we've solved.

What carries over when you switch

Not much, and that's fine. Your allowlist — the sites you've permitted ads on — won't transfer between blockers; there's no shared format. It's usually a handful of sites and quicker to rebuild than to migrate.

Uninstall the old blocker before installing the new one. Not merely disable it — uninstall. On Chrome and Edge, extensions share a static rule budget, so two blockers installed together can leave both with fewer active rules than either would have alone. Running two doesn't double your protection; it can quietly halve it.

FAQ

Is Adblock Plus bad? No. It's a legitimate tool with a disclosed business model, and for a lot of people the default behaviour is genuinely fine. The problem is that the default surprises people who expected everything blocked.

Can I just disable Acceptable Ads instead of switching? Yes — Settings, then uncheck "Allow Acceptable Ads". If that's your only complaint, it's the simplest fix available and you should try it first.

Does Adblock Plus sell my data? Its funding comes from the Acceptable Ads programme, not from selling browsing data. That's a different thing from what people usually mean by "sells your data", and worth keeping straight.

Is AdBlock the same as Adblock Plus? They're separate products, but since 2021 they have had the same owner: eyeo, which makes Adblock Plus, acquired AdBlock (getadblock.com) that April. Both run Acceptable Ads by default, which is why switching from one to the other changes less than you'd expect.

Will switching break the sites I've allowlisted? Your allowlist doesn't carry over, so sites you'd permitted will be blocked again until you re-add them. That's a few minutes of work, not a migration.

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