When comparing Cower vs paru, the Slant community recommends paru for most people. In the question“What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?” paru is ranked 6th while Cower is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose paru is:
You can simply alias yay=paru if you switch from yay.
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 Based on the design of yay
You can simply alias yay=paru if you switch from yay.
Pro Fast
Paru is faster than yay.
Pro Actively maintained
With the main yay developer stepping away from yay, paru is more actively maintained than yay.
Pro Saner defaults than yay
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).