When comparing trizen vs Cower, 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 Cower is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose trizen is:
It's very intuitive and has a pacman-like syntax.
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Pros
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.
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)
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).