When comparing Aura vs trizen, the Slant community recommends trizen for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” trizen is ranked 2nd while Aura is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose trizen is:
It's very intuitive and has a pacman-like syntax.
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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 use
It's very intuitive and has a pacman-like syntax.
Pro Being written in Perl, trizen has an extra level of security over bash as well as performance and power benefits inherent to Perl
It is written in Perl in a functional-recurisive way, featuring full AUR dependencies support.
Being written in Perl (or any other language, except bash), it means that it can't execute/source (silently) the PKGBUILD to get information for a package, which guarantees an extra-level of security. Other benefits are the performance and power that comes with Perl.
Pro Lightweight
It's written in Perl instead of Go that makes it so lightweight.
Pro AUR comments, search and upgrade support
It can display comments for AUR packages, search for AUR packages and check for AUR package updates.
Pro Secure
The PKGBUILD is not executed before it is displayed to the user and optionally edited.
Pro Availability
It's in the Manjaro packages.
Cons
Con aura is difficult to use for system upgrade.
sudo aura -Syu
searches for .sig files for each repository.
.Sig files are not used with pacman