When comparing LaTeX vs Markdown, the Slant community recommends Markdown for most people. In the question“What are the best markup languages?” Markdown is ranked 2nd while LaTeX is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Markdown is:
Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lets you focus on the content
LaTeX handles the design so you can focus on the content
Pro High-quality typesetting by default
There's a reason that scholarly journals often require the use of LaTeX for articles printed in their pages, and it's because the quality of the output is that good. Universities often require, or at least encourage, the use of LaTeX for graduate theses and dissertations for this same reason.
Pro Free open source software
Licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License
Pro Editor-independent
You can edit LaTeX sources in any text editor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cons
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.
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.
Con Not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor
LaTeX uses the paradigm what-you-see-is-what-you-mean instead.
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.
Con Bad support for table
It has poor support for table, while table is an important part of article.
Con Bad support for larger documents
Works good for single file documents like READMEs.
Lack support for cross-references, TOCs, document index etc.
Con It doesn't support semantic markup
It's unstructured.