Even for the uninitiated, the content is surprisingly digestible. The comparison and a brief description of the two begins in section 3.
Raft looks good next to MultiPaxos, but MultiPaxos is hardly the state of the art in the mainline Paxos lineage. MultiPaxos was published in 2001, over a decade before Raft. EPaxos is more of a contemporary to Raft, and arguably more in the spirit of Paxos as originally conceived--truly distributed, leaderless consensus.
[1] Practically every paper discussing Raft, including the original Raft paper(s), aliases Paxos to MultiPaxos.
https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-2-the-journey-continues/
I haven't read any papers recently but if you know of some that are worth giving a read, please let me know!
These days I think Paxos refers both to what Lamport thought of as single decree Paxos, or Paxos leader election, and also the lineage of protocols that derive from it, as well as sometimes specifically MultiPaxos. But it’s OK, words can have multiple meanings.
For what it’s worth even EPaxos is long in the tooth now. There have been several advancements in the intervening years, the latest being Accord[1], a protocol the Cassandra community has developed for cross shard distributed transactions.
[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/download/attachments/188...
(Full disclosure: I’m one of the authors)