There is no question here: if given a choice between only one of the two, 100% of the time (with budget taken out of the equation), you should choose a clear bra first over ceramic coating.

Why?

Clear bra is designed for protection, whereas ceramic coating is intended for cleanup. Once your vehicle begins to get chipped, it is harder to make a clean-looking clear bra installation. We can do SOME coverup using a crayon to existing rock chips, but we won’t offer to clear bra the vehicle at a certain point. Rock chips and scratches appear as imperfections under the clear bra, and if you have a bumper riddled with rock chips, it won’t look good, and the paint protection film won’t lay down over them properly.

We can always polish your paint and apply ceramic coating later, much easier than we can fix rock chips before applying clear bra. 

Furthermore, a ceramic coating fills the peaks and valleys of your paint at a microscopic level. When the paint is filled in like this, decals, tape, and clear bra do not adhere as well. We need to know if your car has been previously ceramic coated before we install clear bra. 

Installing clear bra over ceramic coating is not a lost cause – we can polish off the ceramic, but it is more time-consuming and costly.