Thanks for the video showing how you reproduced your result. As I suspected, my inability to reproduce the same trace result was because the final image posted was post-edited and not representative of the tracer’s raw output. As such, it’s probably not meaningful to conclude much about the tracers based on a comparison of the earlier images because post editing and corrections will always improve the final result.

In general, higher resolution images will always produce considerably better results due to the increased amount of information available for the tracer. Having played a bit more, both tracers seem to produce comparable levels of accuracy in their raw output relative to the original source image (in this example at least) as the attached file shows; the traces are overlaid on the original bitmap set to be all red pixels (can turn antialiasing off for clarity). I would argue that, at least in this case, the Inkscape tracer is easier to produce a final result given that it cuts out holes automatically. This is not surprising though given that Potrace is many years newer. Given that Inkscape is free and you can export to PDF, it’s probably the tracer of choice for this kind of usage as of Feb 2017.

Logo comparison.xar