We describe an interpretation of parareal as a two-level additive Schwarz preconditioner in the time domain. We show that this twolevel preconditioner in time is equivalent to parareal and to multigrid reduction in time (MGRIT) with F-relaxation. We also discuss the case when additional fine or coarse propagation steps are applied in the preconditioner. This leads to procedures equivalent to MGRIT with FCF-relaxation and to MGRIT with F(CF) 2-relaxation or overlapping parareal. Numerical results show that these variants have faster convergence in some cases. In addition, we also apply a Krylov subspace method, namely GMRES (Generalized Minimal Residual), to accelerate the parareal algorithm. Better convergence is obtained, especially for the advection-reaction-diffusion equation in the case when advection and reaction coefficients are large.