Aeon is a mobile-friendly, lightweight privacy coin. Similar to the way that Litecoin is a lighter supplement to Bitcoin, you can look at Aeon as Monero’s little brother. The Monero community is wholly focused on privacy and anonymity for the end-user. This focus has its perks but has caused the coin to fall behind from a usability standpoint. Aeon builds upon Monero’s CryptoNote hash while adding some lightweight functionality of its own. Aeon is the lighter, faster version of Monero. Although both projects share the same underlying privacy protocol, CryptoNote, Aeon is striving to be more accessible. The project is doing so by implementing a lightweight mining algorithm, smaller blockchain, and optional anonymity. As Monero grows, Aeon could very well grow with it. While you would use Monero for transactions in which you want to assure privacy, you may find Aeon to be a suitable substitute for day-to-day exchanges in which guaranteed anonymity isn’t as important.
Novacoin is a hybrid Proof of work (POW) / Proof of stake (POS) decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.The Proof of Work part of Novacoin is based on the Scrypt hashing algorithm. Proof of Stake contributes to the coins energy efficiency, as there is no need for nodes to contribute mining power to part of the money creation process. As of now, Novacoin is set to be capped at 2 billion coins. However Novacoin stated that the cap limit may be lifted if the situation requires it. It looks very much like a variation of Sunny King Peercoin.