Ceramic. Steel is for vehicles. Hesco, makes great plates as does safe life, Archangel makes super light stuff but it's expensive. There are other good plate makers. I wear multi hit level iv at work or a 4 in front and a 3+ multi hit in back depending on which vest i have on. Almost everyone at work wears ceramic. One guy wears steel, and he only wears steel on his side panels because he cant find the ceramic that fits his carrier in his size.
You can get military sapi plates on EBay from time to time. Steel plates are just awful to wear, it was all we have when i first started wearing one as a cop. We'd serve a warrant and then as soon as dude as in cuffs back they went in the trunk. They were very similar to the old "Ranger vest" you might have seen in movies like black hawk down. I only had to wear mine for a hour or so at a time and that was not fun. BUT i didn't want to take a hit to just a IIIa soft vest given the choice. They weight a ton and never fit right, and this is from a guy that wears 50 lbs of steel and runs around for fun.
The ONLY place that steel is better is that you can drop them and treat them more like crap and they dont degrade. OR you can cut your load out weight by half and just take care of your kit. If you wear steel you better be fast before you put on kit cus it's gonna slow you down. If i could get the new hybrid UHMWPE ultra light plates i would. It sucked lugging the standard load out we had for the guard with no one actually shooting at us. I would never try and ad 15 lbs to that for no reason and then go fight with no support, medics, rto etc etc etc. If you absolutely cannot get anything else steel is better than skin BUT if at all possible at least try and get the military surplus SAPI plates.
If i can get to one of the training weekends i'll bring more than just a work vest and go through all the body armor i have laying around from stuffs over the years. I have an old heavy nylon carrier IIIA point blank i bought as a security guard in the 90's, i think i have an old tank crewman's vest and a PASGT.....all the way to fairly new IOTV and a current minimalist plate carrier.
One caveat Soft armor is also very important, have at least the soft armor bullet backers. but there is NO reason to get anything less than a IIIa soft vest now. IT's all so thin and so light now that there is no real trade off with weight on soft armor. And the prices arent even that much less for lower threat soft armor. Heck there is rifle threat soft armor out there now, if you has the $$$
i'll save helmet comments for later
