When comparing Habitica vs Emacs Org-mode, the Slant community recommends Emacs Org-mode for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform task apps?” Emacs Org-mode is ranked 3rd while Habitica is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Emacs Org-mode is:
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can use peer pressure to motivate
The app allows creating a party with other people and go on a quest together. Here, your actions affect not just you, but everyone else in the party as well. If you fail a task, the party loses health, if you complete a task, the party gains experience, etc.
Pro Gamifies the process to motivate
The app takes cues from role playing games by having a system that rewards certain behavior with experience points, levels, and gear upgrades. It also allows you to set custom rewards that you come up with yourself such as watching an episode of your favorite TV show.
Pro Ultimate flexibility
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Pro Absolutely free
Emacs with Org-mode is free as in beer and free as in speech – that is, it costs nothing and it’s totally open source.
Pro Files are usable anywhere at anytime
Users are not tied to one service provider, program, platform, or database engine.
Pro Incredibly extensible
There are many plug-ins for Org-mode, including Org-habits and Org-notify. If Org-mode lacks some piece of functionality, it is very easy to add it.
Pro Agenda views
Pro Excellent unofficial Android app (orgzly)
Pro Offline support
Pro Efficient features for deadline organization
Pro Supports plaintext spreadsheets
Pro There are a lot of extensions, for exporting to html, bootstrap, js-reveal and much more
Pro Quickly add rich text
Cons
Con Occasional bugs and laggyness
The app is still in beta and has the occasional bug to work out.
Con Can cause needless stress
As with most gamified systems it includes punishments for failures. Fear of failure can cause stress and failures can demotivate.
Con Unintuitive user interface
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.
Con Android app isn't very good
There are several user-created apps for Android, but none seem to offer the same level of functionality as other to-do apps.
Con Not really cross platform
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.
Con By default, a hard-to-read display
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.