Alcatraz manages ‘Xcode packages’, e.g. Xcode plugins and color schemes. CocoaPods manages dependencies of your Objective-C project.

It's not competing with CocoaPods. Alcatraz gives you a nice UI for installing Xcode plugins, color themes, etc. to customize your editor, while CocoaPods is management of libraries for iOS and OS X development.

Think of Alcatraz as the Xcode equivalent of Will Bond's "Package Control" package for Sublime Text. Cocoapods is a dependency manager, more like PHP's composer.phar (or whatever your language of choice's current dependency-manager-of-choice happens to be).

This is not a replacement for Cocoapods, it manages plugins for Xcode itself, color themes, project templates. That kind of stuff :)

They're solving different problems. Marin Usalj (Alcatraz developer) is actually a member of the CocoaPods core team: http://cocoapods.org/about