Subdomains are better because some applications don't like to be in a custom path and might not work.
A single DNS entry (like *.local.example.com) should be enough to use anything in the subdomain instead of creating one entry for each application. (portainer.local.example.com, pihole.local.example.com, etc).
If your provider doesn't support that, can't you use Cloudflare? It's free.
Subdomains are better because some applications don't like to be in a custom path and might not work.
A single DNS entry (like *.local.example.com) should be enough to use anything in the subdomain instead of creating one entry for each application. (portainer.local.example.com, pihole.local.example.com, etc).
If your provider doesn't support that, can't you use Cloudflare? It's free.