When comparing JuK vs cmus, the Slant community recommends cmus for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” cmus is ranked 5th while JuK is ranked 36th. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very nice library-wise playlist function
Once the queue is done, it goes back to the regular library playlist.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Simple UI
The UI of JuK will probably be familiar to most users making it very straight forward to use.
Pro CLI only
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Pro Does not use a lot of memory
Cmus only uses about 15 MB. This is a very small and light media player, which is ideal for people with low end hardware.
Pro Good library structure
A lot of music players may act more like playlist viewers rather than a music library. cmus sorts by Artist > Year > Album.
Pro Works very well with tags from MusicBrainz database
cmus will factor in additional data from the MusicBrainz database while sorting. For example sort orders for arist or album, and the original release date for an album (in the case of a re-release).
Pro Fast
A lot of music players will be slow when starting if they have huge libraries, but CMus starts fast no matter the library size.
Pro Customizable keybindings for a personal experience
You can add keybindings for just about anything - including seeking (forward/backwards 1 minute, for example) which isn't supported by all music players.
Pro No mouse required
cmus does not require a mouse as it runs in the terminal
Pro Open source extensions and scripts
On GitHub you can find the official WIKI where there are a dozen extensions and scripts from color themes to a lyrics viewer and the ability to play YouTube songs.
Cons
Con No seamless transition between different audio files
Con A bit buggy
Con No album art
cmus does not display album art
Con CLI only
No graphical interface is available for cmus. Everything is done through CLI (command line interface).
Con Difficult to use
Cmus uses odd keyboard shortcuts such as "C" to pause, "E" to add songs to queue, and "4" to edit the queue.