There’s a disadvantaged group of people in our industry that use Markdown to prepare their text for output to, say, PDF or HTML. I call these folks disadvantaged because Markdown, although fine for preparing simple documents for publication, has some serious deficiencies when compared to Org mode. I’m not talking the syntax, which is different from Org’s but just as good. Org is more powerful as a markup language but really shines as an embedded mode of Emacs which provides editing commands specialized to Org that aid in producing serious documents.
Another problem with Markdown is that there isn’t a Markdown but several. The original Markdown was relatively simple so users such as GitHub extended it but, of course, each in different ways. The result is that there are several dialects of Markdown. While there are ports of Org mode to other editors, there is still only one Org mode markup language.
Org mode provides a very comfortable and flexible writing environment that can easily handle complex documents. Still, sometimes you need to deliver Markdown for certain applications, Websites, or sharing with users who aren’t Emacsers. That’s not a problem because Org can export to Markdown. But there are problems.
Franco Pasut has a useful post that looks at exporting from Org to Markdown. In particular, he explains how to covert Org tables to Markdown tables. The TL;DR is to use Pandoc specifying the --to-gfm option. He also discusses some problems with exporting code blocks to Markdown. If you find yourself having to export to Markdown, you should probably take a look at Pasut’s post.