I can't help but think this is a bit more of an apples-to-oranges comparison than it's being treated as in this post. Org's introduction (chapter 1.1 of its man

I can't help but think this is a bit more of an apples-to-oranges comparison than it's being treated as in this post. Org's introduction (chapter 1.1 of its manual) begins, * Org is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, and project planning with a fast and effective plain-text markup language. It also is an authoring system with unique support for literate programming and reproducible research.* Whereas the introduction to Markdown from its original author begins simply, Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. These are both lightweight markup languages, sure, but they're designed for different domains. What makes Org-mode interesting isn't ultimately its markup language; look at all the comments here talking about tasks and tags and such. What makes it interesting is its implementation. Markdown, conversely, was explicitly intended as an HTML preprocessor. You can do anything in Markdown that you can do in HTML for the simple reason that if you can't do it in Markdown, you can literally use HTML. That's not what Org-mode is for. I think the thesis of this article is basically "Org-mode's specific choices with respect to markup syntax are better than Markdown's." And, well, fine; I'm not entirely sure I agree, but I'm not sure it really matters. What does matter to me is that Markdown (a) works very well for what I want in practice and (b) works everywhere I want it to. If I was one of the folks who lived in Emacs, the chances are Org-mode would handily hit both of those points for me. But I'm not. And as lucideer noted in his comment, just because it's possible to use (a subset of) Org-mode's markup outside Emacs doesn't mean it offers any particular advantage over, well, Markdown.