Here’s the Deal

Aura vs yay

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When comparing Aura vs yay, the Slant community recommends yay for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” yay is ranked 1st while Aura is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose yay is:

It's written in Go so it is fairly easy to add features or tweak this amazing tool.

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Common Questions

What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?

Pros

Pro
Written in Haskell

Since the application is written in Haskell, it means that, unless the author went out of their way to subvert the type system, at least some classes of bugs must have been eliminated for the project to even compile, and so at least some basic level of stability is guaranteed.

Pro
Similar syntax to pacman

pacman -Ss ghc
aura -As ghc

Pro
Run as Root, Build as a User

makepkg gets very upset if you try to build a package as root. That said, a built package can't be handed off to pacman and installed if you don't run as root. Other AUR helpers ignore this problem, but Aura does not. Even when run with sudo, packages are built with normal user privilages, then handed to pacman and installed as root.

Pro
Easy to add features

It's written in Go so it is fairly easy to add features or tweak this amazing tool.

Pro
Intuitive CLI

Yay's commands and output make sense for anyone used to the pacman package manager.

Pro
Written in Go

The compiled program is snappy while the source is easy to read.

Pro
Available as a precompiled binary

Both yay and yay-bin are in the AUR, the latter of which doesn't require any dependencies or compilation, making installation and updates quick and painless.