Simplenote vs Emacs Org-mode

Notes are encrypted in transit, but remain unencrypted on Simplenote's servers.

You are able to sort your notes alphabetically, date modified, or by last created. There is no way to drag and drop the notes to create a custom order.

You cannot set reminders to revisit a specific note or complete a task.

Simplenote doesn't provide support for embedded attachments. This can limit the use for some as many other note-taking apps do support this type of feature.

There seems to be no way to find notes that have both tag X and tag Y. This isn't a big deal until you have a large library of notes, and want to cross-search for two things at the same time to vastly narrow down your search.

They recently removed support for older browsers, and it's not working on the latest version of Waterfox. You need an updated version of a well-known browser.

If you search for 'foo' you won't find notes with tag foo. In that regard, tags are completely isolated from the search.

This is a typical workflow action in other apps: Do a search, multi-select notes among the matches, then apply or de-apply one or more tags to all these notes at once.
There's no way to do this in Simplenote. The only bulk operations are Delete and Pin-to-top.

Currently, there is no way to be alerted when a change is made by another contributor on a shared note.

The only way to download your data off Simplenote is via a "download zip" feature that unfortunately loses all the semantic structure of your data (tags, for instance).

The only way you can share notes with others is with a link you're given when you publish your note. There is no integrated social media sharing if you directly want to post your note to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There are two themes available, the default theme and a dark theme.
Both use only the single solid color (either white or black) for the background, so there is a lack of visual cues to separate what you're looking at.

The key combinations are unintuitive and difficult to remember. This is probably because there are a lot of hidden "modes" depending on where the cursor is. Actions aren't paired with reversing actions like in other todo apps. For example, hitting shift-tab does NOT reverse the effect of hitting tab.

There are several user-created apps for Android, but none seem to offer the same level of functionality as other to-do apps.

Although it is possible to get a lot of it working, no all in one, sync included, out of the box solution is available for mobile devices.

The default way of writing an outline or checklist creates a very messy wall of text that's difficult to read with no vertical spacing. You can manually add vertical spacing, but the Org operations don't preserve it. There are pretty-display modes, but you need to remember how to enable them, etc. etc.