Both are so close that I would not be able to pick one.
Norton is better for novice users, which it is basically designed for.
Emsisoft has improved so much over the years that I would say it just as good as Norton especially with the new BitDefender engine.
Both suffer from high false positives, Norton is actually worse now since they added the community watch. Emsisoft has gotten better with false positives but still has too many. Of coarse that may change since they dropped IKarus and moved to BitDefender.
I'm not sure if Norton has fixed the problem with exclusions, the community watch appeared to ignore your exclusion list and delete detected files anyway. That was my main complaint since it has so many false positives and it deleted many safe files that I wanted to keep without notification, I haven't tried the latest Norton because I don't know if they fixed this problem. Emsisoft's exclusion list works the way it should so it is easy to deal with false positives.
For protection, detection and removal both Norton and Emsisoft are about the same.
Thanks.