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.
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.
I even write for my 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 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.