When comparing Markdown vs reStructuredText, the Slant community recommends Markdown for most people. In the question“What are the best markup languages?” Markdown is ranked 1st while reStructuredText is ranked 5th. 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.
Question Ranking
Pros
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 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.
Pro Parsing from Python
Python's docutils include a parser for RestructuredText.
Pro Technical Documentation
Without any adjustments RST has many facilities for writing technical documentation (API docs, syntax highlighting code, embed code from source files).
Pro Extensible
Generators such as Sphinx allow you to define your own custom roles, directives and output generators.
Pro Human-readable
reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system.
Cons
Con Lacks a coherent standard
Lacks a coherent standard, just many semi-compatible dialects (MultiMarkdown, etc)