Org Mode was created by Carsten Dominik in 2003, originally to organize his own life and work,[3] and since the first release numerous other users and developers have contributed to this free software package.

[11] The Org system author Carsten Dominik explains that "Org Mode does outlining, note-taking, hyperlinks, spreadsheets, TODO lists, project planning, GTD, HTML and LaTeX authoring, all with plain text files in Emacs.

The Linux Information Project explains that "Plain text is supported by nearly every application program on every operating system".

[13] The system includes a lightweight markup language for plain text files (similar in function to Markdown, reStructuredText, Textile, etc., with a different implementation), allowing lines or sections of plain text to be hierarchically divided, tagged, linked, and so on.

Org Mode offers the ability to insert source code in the document being edited, which is automatically exported and/or executed when exporting the document; the result(s) produced by this code can be automatically fetched back in the resulting output.

From org-mode, add-on packages export to other markup format such as MediaWiki (org-export-generic, org-export), to flashcard learning systems implementing SuperMemo's algorithms (org-drill, org-learn).

[17] Outside of org-mode editors, org markup is supported by the GitLab, GitHub[18] and Gitea code repositories, the JIRA issue tracker,[19] Pandoc and others.