RAxML (Randomized Axelerated Maximum Likelihood) is a program for sequential and parallel Maximum Likelihood based inference of large phylogenetic trees. It has originally been derived from fastDNAml which in turn was derived from Joe Felsentein’s dnaml which is part of the PHYLIP package.
RAxML-NG is a phylogenetic tree inference tool which uses maximum-likelihood (ML) optimality criterion. Its search heuristic is based on iteratively performing a series of Subtree Pruning and Regrafting (SPR) moves, which allows to quickly navigate to the best-known ML tree. RAxML-NG is a successor of RAxML (Stamatakis 2014) and leverages the highly optimized likelihood computation implemented in libpll (Flouri et al. 2014).
RAxML-Light is a strapped down RAxML version for conducting tree searches on very large trees under the CAT approximation and GAMMA model of rate heterogeneity.