This is a charged topic and it'll impossible for you to get a "clean" answer here. One man's heresy is another man's bravery and one could argue that neither denomination acted particularly out of turn given the standards of the time.

Having said that, you'll need to be far more particular in your comparison because you still aren't identifying apples to apples. The Catholic Church, broadly speaking the Roman-Catholic Church, is one, singular denomination whose head is the Bishop of Rome, also popularly known as the Pope. Martin Luther was one of the most important leaders of the Protestant Reformation, but his writings encouraged the development of several state churches organized around their respective Sovereign. Delving in a bit further into the topic, some Protestant state churches were also typically "more tolerant" according to a modern conception of moral values so you'll need to be a lot more specific.