I just went to clearinghouses page and it says they are based off the counterparty protocol and also run on the bitcoin blockchain. In other words they are a counterparty clone without the exposure and interest of big companies. As far as which is better? Well if they are clones then from a technical standpoint both are pretty much the same, the big difference will be in the people who are the lead developers of the coin and also the "community" of the coin. In the case of counterparty, the CEO of Overstock specifically said in his speech that he went to a bitcoin conference, met the counterparty guys "randomly" and had such a good connection with the devs he decided on the spot that he wanted to work with them.
Clearinghouse runs on the Viacoin blockchain not BTC.
I stand corrected, in that case Counterparty is definitely better to choose since the crypto ecosystem is starting to show as such that anything running on the ultra secure bitcoin blockchain is better than starting a new blockchain or using one less secure.
But from what I understand, isn't clearinghouse compatible with, but not reliant on the bitcoin blockchain? Giving it flexibility and security? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm a novice.
No. Clearinghouse is not on Bitcoin. You're either on Bitcoin or you're not and Clearinghouse is not. It could be made to work with Bitcoin because Clearinghouse is a clone of Counterparty, but then, Counterparty is already on Bitcoin. If being on Bitcoin were not such a huge advantage the Counterparty developers could move it to another chain in a day or so. They won't because there is absolutely no reason to be on another chain, but it is possible. Any flexibility and security feature that Clearinghouse has, it has because the Counterparty developers wrote the code and open sourced it on GitHub so that other people could use it as well.