When comparing Cower 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 Cower is ranked 14th. 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.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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)
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.
Pro Yogurt interactive mode
Write package name without keys [yay <packagename>] to enter interactive mode.
Pro Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen
Cons
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).
Con Written in Go
Running a Go program requires the Go runtime. Go is also a garbage collected language, so the program isn't as responsive as it could be.