When comparing Yaourt vs Cower, the Slant community recommends Yaourt for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” Yaourt is ranked 5th while Cower is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Yaourt is:
Yaourt commands and flags match pacman, so it is immediately obvious how to use it.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Equivalent to pacman
Yaourt commands and flags match pacman, so it is immediately obvious how to use it.
Pro Colored output
Pro Adds seamless access to the AUR
Pro Can be set up upgrade your system with no additional prompts
Pro You can adapt PKGBUILD to your needs during the (pre-)installation process
Pro Supports backups
Pro Very powerful search
Pro Minimalistic & Simple
Some other solutions are like using a chainsaw as a butterknife, yeah it goes through the butter, but then it also goes through your leg, and you really wish you would have just grabbed the stick of butter and smeared it on your bread with your hands.
Cower is the butterknife. It's easier than maintaining everything by hand but also forces you to pay attention (which you need to do anyway)
Cons
Con Insecure
More information here.
Con Not maintained anymore
According to the Wiki page of Archlinux, Yaourt development is stalled.
Con Does not perform clean builds
Environment variables may get carried over while building a package, preventing successful building.
Con Bad split packages support
Con No automatic build support.
Con Does not support the modern RPC interface
cower was never updated to take advantage of the multiinfo support introduced in https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17583 and therefore puts a heavy burden on the AUR server in addition to sometimes suffering timeouts. Users of cower are heavily encouraged to migrate to its successor, auracle (created by the cower developer as the next generation of cower).