When comparing Cower vs Pakku, the Slant community recommends Pakku for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” Pakku is ranked 10th while Cower is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Pakku is:
Has option to auto remove all unused build dependencies.
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 Auto removes build dependencies
Has option to auto remove all unused build dependencies.
Pro Wraps pacman
Installation or updates of official or aur packages can all be done with pakku.
Pro Uses pacman interface
Easy to use for anyone familiar with pacman.
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).