When comparing Cower vs pikaur, the Slant community recommends pikaur for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” pikaur is ranked 3rd while Cower is ranked 14th.
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 AUR package names in shell completion (bash, fish, zsh)
Pro Upgrade -git, -svn and other dev packages
Pro Using systemd dynamic users if building packages as root user
Pro Show unread Arch news before sysupgrade
Pro Interactively handle common build problems (like untrusted GPG key or checksum mismatch, wrong architecture)
Pro Can install packages even when others fail
Sometimes when building multiple unrelated packages, the failure of one means that none get installed. With this helper, it will not only ask you what to do during a failure, but you can skip the package all together without having to restart.
Pro Remove make dependencies on completion
Some AUR packages require at times dozens of dependencies solely for the build process. Usually, once the build process is done, they stick around without purpose. This helper automatically removes those dependencies once all the builds are complete.
Pro Retrieve PKGBUILDs from AUR and ABS (-G/--getpkgbuild)
Pro Build local PKGBUILDs with AUR deps (-P/--pkgbuild)
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 Splits pacman -Syu to -Sy and -Su
-Sy (to refresh package list first) and -Su (to install upgrades after user confirmed the package list or has been altered it via [M]anual package selection).