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What are the best markup languages?

Options
Considered

216

User
Recs.

Dec 12, 2023

Last
Updated

18 Options Considered

Best markup languages	Price	Platforms	Price
-- Org-mode	-	-	-
50 Markdown	-	-	-
-- HyperText Markup Language (HTML)	FREE	-	-
-- AsciiDoc	FREE	-	-
-- reStructuredText	-	Python	FREE

See Full List

Org-mode

Top Pro

Export to HTML, LATEX, ODT and more

Top Con

Limited support outside of Emacs

If you want to use a different text editor, you miss out on advanced features. See More

Arne Babenhauserheide's Experience

Using orgmode for 20 years now, and it is the only tool that makes writing LaTeX convenient and enables me to stay somewhat organized. See More

Top Pro

Very flexible

Org-mode is characterized by a flexible and versatile system with the ability to adapt to different workflows, making it comparable as an Evernote alternative. It is at once simple and complex, which helps it to compete as an Evernote alternative. See More

HarmoniousZhangGuolao's Experience

I use it as a project management tool. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use as its plain text

It is plain text which visible in any text editor. Out of the box support is best in Emacs as of now. See More

TrustingAgon's Experience

Very simple and clear, yet incredibly powerful syntax. Especially easy management of lists and checkboxes. Very powerful support of tags and more complex attributes (especially "properties", which allow for database-like functionalities). An incredibly useful and powerful tool: Org-babel, which is a metalanguage. Add to it the power of Emacs and all its packages... See More

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box Latex support

Org-mode has out-of-the-box support for Latex: it can immediately parse equations (or other Latex markup) and can even compile notes to PDF or HTML. See More

PassionateAmanikable's Experience

Most comprehensive and easy to use markup language ever made that isn't XML. Problem is that it has first party support only for Emacs as it isn't made a standard yet. See More

Top Pro

Basic spreadsheet functionality

Org-mode has some basic spreadsheet functionality. Other than auto-formatting ASCII tables (a notoriously annoying problem), it also has support for LISP-like syntax to define equations or any other functionality that can be achieved through spreadsheets. See More

JoyousHuitztlampaehecatl's Experience

Pretty powerful See More

Top Pro

Regular syntax for exporter-specific adaptions

To polish output for a specific exporter — i.e. LaTeX or HTML — you can define content that only that exporter sees. This enables the small tweaks that make the difference between just a conversion and getting a beautiful document in different formats, using the strengths of each export format instead of limiting to the smallest common denominator. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

With some simple emacs-setup, orgmode can be very user-friendly and anyone can pick it up in about an hour. See More

Top Pro

Versioning can be tracked and synced using Git or other VCS

Org files are plain text, and lend themselves well to version control. Emacs also has good integrations for various VCS. See More

Top Pro

Built-in agenda

Org-mode has some built-in agenda functionality. You can schedule tasks and assign various degrees of importance to each of them. Org-mode agenda can also be synced with Google Calendar. See More

Top Pro

Expands beyond other markup tool functionality and can work with mobile applications

Top Pro

Great sync support

Notes and to-dos can be synced with Trello, Toodledo, Simplenote, Orgmobile, or with tools like Git on Github, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Bitbucket, while WebDAV (with iOS and Android) can also be exported to PDF, mind map, LaTeX, HTML, Docbook, or txt. See More

Top Pro

Embedded metadata

Orgmode uses a number of metadata values which can be defined inside a document such as author, date, document title etc. which can be but do not have to be used by different exporters. These can be especially useful when searching through a large number of files/documents or documenting the evolution of one as part of a larger codebase. See More

Top Pro

You can adapt Org to your workflow while stabilizing it

See All

Markdown

Top Con

Lacks a coherent standard

Lacks a coherent standard, just many semi-compatible dialects (MultiMarkdown, etc). This inconsistency can cause problems if the person writing the Markdown is using a different dialect from the one that will be used to render it. See More

Top Pro

Human-readable

Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form. See More

Deatheart's Experience

Bad support for table See More

Top Con

Bad support for table

It has poor support for table, while table is an important part of article. See More

Top Pro

Widely used

Markdown is quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments. See More

PersistentEuthenia's Experience

Markdown is a poor choice compared to other lightweight markup languages. See More

Top Con

Bad support for larger documents

Works good for single file documents like READMEs. Lack support for cross-references, TOCs, document index etc. See More

Top Pro

De facto standard

Markdown is ubiquitous. It's supported by nearly everything. The markup available in the common subset of all the many dialects isn't that rich, but it's usually enough to get the job done. See More

Peter J. Mello's Experience

While I do like the fact that Markdown has achieved a breadth of utilization across various tech-related or -adjacent domains to become fairly ubiquitous, I firmly believe that most, if not all of them, would objectively be better served by almost any other markup language that isn't overly intricate, especially if they were governed by a single, canonical standard whose evolution was guided by a democratic/meritocratic organization. Markdown continues to have far too many "flavors" and a feature set which never seems to grow meaningfully or consistently. See More

Top Con

It doesn't support semantic markup

It's unstructured. See More

Top Pro

Multi-directional

You can convert HTML to Markdown or Markdown to HTML. You can use tools like pandoc to convert to other formats as well. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Easy to read and understand and widely supported, Notepad++ has a plugin for Markdown. See More

Top Pro

Revision friendly

It is easy to track changes for markdown documents as compared to other formats like doc, html, etc. You only need to place your markdown documents under some version control system. See More

See All

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

Top Con

Verbose

Tags can hide actual content. See More

Top Pro

Styling via CSS

Styling through CSS is declarative and powerful, but somewhat inadequate for print without expensive tools like Prince. See More

newtum's Experience

HTML is the best Markup Language. If you are a beginner then this HTML certification from IIT Bombay must have in your pocket. https://newtum.com/course-details/learn-html See More

Top Pro

Natively understood by browsers

Natively understood by browsers, you can author and view HTML on virtually every computer without any additional software. See More

Top Pro

Most universal and widely used markup language

Top Pro

Simple

HTML is fairly simple for both humans and machines. It can be repetitive and burdensome to type, but less so than most other XML or SGML-derived formats. See More

Top Pro

Simple interactivity through JavaScript

JavaScript code can be embedded directly into a HTML document. See More

See All

AsciiDoc

Top Pro

Standardized format

The formatting of Asciidoc is standardized so there is only one 'flavor' unlike in Markdown. The definitive user guide is here. See More

Top Con

Not as popular/widely used as Markdown

The Asciidoc format is not as popular/widely used as Markdown. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Asciidoc is used for some of the following projects: O'Reilly and Maker Press NFJS, the magazine other examples See More

Peter J. Mello's Experience

As both a software developer and an 18-year+ contributor to Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia/WikiBooks/WikiVoyage, I've written a lot of markdown...a LOT. It gets the job done, no doubt, but the only thing it has going for it is the first-to-market advantage. The specification (Commonmark) is ridiculously resistant to evolving, especially for a widely-adopted standard, which has led to (by my count) no fewer than 32(!!!) different implementations of it in which almost always tweak aspects of it, precisely because there are so many features that are central to usability that the spec. writers simply refuse to address. It sucks. A couple years ago I ended up working on a project hosted on a GitLab instance that required me ending up having to really dig into the documentation, and in the process encountered their advocacy for writing documentation in AsciiDoc format instead. I must've been extra fed-up with markdown at the time, because I jumped at the chance to use a different syntax, even if I had to learn it from scratch. I know I wasn't even two hours into the process of documenting my work when I stopped typing mid-sentence and sat back in my chair, mouth agape, and thought to myself, "Holy sh*t, this format has everything I've always wished markdown offered, AND a bunch of handy features that I hadn't even thought to want to use! I have no explanation why it's so lightly used, because ever since I leap at any chance to use it in place of markdown. Admittedly the syntax isn't as bare-bones simplistic, so it requires some practice, but the output is of such higher quality by comparison, I have no doubt more people would use it if it had broader support. Sadly, I can't think of any major services that support it out of the box other than GitLab, but if you do any document creation there or somewhere else that will parse it, I implore you to try it out for yourself and see for yourself just how much of an improvement it is. See More

Top Pro

Human-readable

Simple, easy-to-read style similar to Markdown. Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form. See More

Top Con

Limited output options

Asciidoctor can only convert directly to HTML or DocBook. However, you can always use another converter such as pandoc to convert from one of the output formats to another format. See More

ReliableRaediengiedte's Experience

I've been using Markdown for the past 11 years for various needs where the content is more important than the looks of the output. Finding AsciiDoc and its rich list of functions and clean syntax has made me hate Word even more; finally a way of writing documentation that doesn't hurt me to my soul! I'd even go as far to say that I'm actually enjoying the process with AsciiDoc! See More

Top Pro

Technical Documentation

The DocBook format which Asciidoctor can convert to was originally developed with the creation of computer books in mind and thus has a rich array of formatting options which are powerful enough to manage the formatting of lengthy technical books. See More

PersistentEuthenia's Experience

Asciidoctor is the best lightweight markup language available. It's structured, supports semantic markup, and extensible. It's great for longer documents. It's also better than Markdown for short, ad-hoc materials. See More

Top Pro

Supported by GitHub and GitLab

Both GitHub and GitLab support AsciiDoc syntax in repositories, wikis and Gists/Snippets (powered by the Asciidoctor Ruby gem). See More

MeticulousEris's Experience

It is a well documented standard (unlike Markdown which has many versions), and has all the benefits of Markdown, plus more. See More

Top Pro

It's structured

Cleanly transforms to DocBook and HTML5. See More

ExceptionalCerberus's Experience

I write documentation and present sessions using asciidoctor. It is very complete and easy to extend if you decide to install ruby local on your machine. it integrates great with plantuml! See More

Top Pro

Supports semantic markup

Top Pro

Native support for colored output

AsciiDoc has offered the ability to define both the color of any text output as well as its background, almost since its inception. It accepts several standard chromatic notations for them, too, including hexadecimal and decimal RGB values, decimal HSL and named CSS. See More

Top Pro

Embedded metadata

The AsciiDoc standard defines a number of metadata values which can be defined inside a document primarily for contextual purposes that aren't rendered in its standard output such as author, date, license, document title and version, etc. These can be especially useful when searching through a large number of files/documents or documenting the evolution of one as part of a larger codebase. See More

Top Pro

Shorter, more concise than Markdown

Top Pro

Good tool support

There are plugins to support editing AsciiDoc for many editors/IDEs. See More

See All

reStructuredText

Top Pro

Human-readable

reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system. See More

Top Con

Setup can be tedious

If you prefer Python to stay out of the way so that you can focus on the task you are doing, you will find that overall Python just asserts itself far to much. See More

ProductiveIasion's Experience

I personally see Markdown as too much of a mess with different incompatible flavors. Using double whitespace at the end of the line as a hard linebreak is also something that I don't like. There's no unified standard. See More

Specs

Platforms:Python

Price:FREE

Top Pro

Technical documentation

Without any adjustments RST has many facilities for writing technical documentation (API docs, syntax highlighting code, embed code from source files). See More

Top Pro

Parsing from Python

Python's docutils include a parser for RestructuredText. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Generators such as Sphinx allow you to define your own custom roles, directives and output generators. See More

Top Pro

It's standardized

There's only one standard to adhere to - no "flavors". See More

Top Pro

Large collections of themes available

See All

LaTeX

Top Pro

Effortless math input

The whole reason that TeX -- and, by extension, LaTeX -- exists is to give people an easy way (well, for some value of "easy") to produce high-quality documents with properly laid out mathematical expressions and text in them. As long as you know the language (or have a reference sheet handy), you can include mathematical expressions in your document with little to no extra effort needed on your part. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

LaTeX is not what you'd consider easy to use, and while there's plenty of documentation out there, much of it is rather opaque unless you're a seasoned TeXnician. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

Database management:No

Project management:No

Word processing:Yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

High-quality typesetting by default

Top Con

Not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor

Top Pro

Free open source software

Licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License. See More

Top Con

Single-threaded design

LaTeX is single-threaded by design, since it must necessarily work sequentially to produce each page as it is laid out by the typesetting engine. This makes it dependent on the power of just one individual core in your multi-core computer setup and so migrating to a machine with more cores won't necessarily make your LaTeX documents build faster. See More

Top Pro

Editor-independent

You can edit LaTeX sources in any text editor. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on every major OS and gives exactly the same quality output everywhere you go. LaTeX on macOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and even Mac OS 9 has exactly the same output for a given set of sources. See More

See All

DokuWiki

Creole

All

Pros

Top Pro

Reasonable adoption

MoinMoin

R Markdown

RDoc (Ruby Documentation System)

Plain Old Documentation (POD)

Texinfo

Muse-Formatted Text

JBake

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18 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Org-mode

My Recommendation for Org-mode

Export to HTML, LATEX, ODT and more

Limited support outside of Emacs

Very flexible

Easy to use as its plain text

Out-of-the-box Latex support

Basic spreadsheet functionality

Regular syntax for exporter-specific adaptions

Easy to learn

Versioning can be tracked and synced using Git or other VCS

Built-in agenda

Expands beyond other markup tool functionality and can work with mobile applications

Great sync support

Embedded metadata

You can adapt Org to your workflow while stabilizing it

My Recommendation for Markdown

My Recommendation for Markdown

Lacks a coherent standard

Human-readable

Bad support for table

Widely used

Bad support for larger documents

De facto standard

It doesn't support semantic markup

Multi-directional

Revision friendly

My Recommendation for HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

My Recommendation for HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

Verbose

Styling via CSS

Natively understood by browsers

Most universal and widely used markup language

Simple

Simple interactivity through JavaScript

My Recommendation for AsciiDoc

My Recommendation for AsciiDoc

Standardized format

Not as popular/widely used as Markdown

Human-readable

Limited output options

Technical Documentation

Supported by GitHub and GitLab

It's structured

Supports semantic markup

Native support for colored output

Embedded metadata

Shorter, more concise than Markdown

Good tool support

My Recommendation for reStructuredText

My Recommendation for reStructuredText

Human-readable

Setup can be tedious

Technical documentation

Parsing from Python

Extensible

It's standardized

Large collections of themes available

My Recommendation for LaTeX

My Recommendation for LaTeX

Effortless math input

Steep learning curve

High-quality typesetting by default

Not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor

Free open source software

Single-threaded design

Editor-independent

Cross-platform

My Recommendation for Textile

My Recommendation for Textile

not extensible

Human-readable

not widely used

Not bi-directional

My Recommendation for MediaWiki

My Recommendation for MediaWiki

Difficult to set up

Non-linear

Templates