Org mode or Markdown?
Why I choose orgmode over Markdown.
I started out with markdown, but switched to org-mode after a few years of using markdown.
I think that Markdown is more readable than org-mode - especially if
you don't use Emacs. You have the special headings with underline while
org-mode uses a line starting with #+title: as title and *, **,
… for chapter/section/… headings. Also markdown links are
[text](link) instead of [[link][text]] and footnotes are
[^footnote] instead of [fn:footnote].
On the other hand, org-mode can do about everything you might want to do with a plain-text list - from planning your work and scheduling your writing time to including code-fragments which actually can get executed on export, so an exported document always contains the output of the latest version of the code automatically.
The slight increase in complexity gives it a enormous increase in flexibility.
I switched to org-mode after starting to use it just for todo lists. Then I realized that I could also write nicely in it. And that the link syntax might be more complex than markdown, but C-c C-l generates it for me. And that exporting just works.
If you use Emacs, I would definitely suggest org-mode. If you don’t use Emacs yet, org-mode alone may be worth starting with it.
I even write for a markdown-based website with org-mode, using the markdown-export, which for example adds support for convenient creation and editing of beautiful tables.
There is something going for tools like markdown which are tailored to one requirement — they can be a somewhat better fit for that requirement than any tool which also has to support something else — but org mode is such a huge win in everything else, and that with so little additional overhead and without any esoteric-feeling syntax, that I have strong preference for org-mode nowadays.
If you give org-mode a try, also have a look at How to do X with Emacs Org-Mode.
Originally written on Stackoverflow.