Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The software was originally developed by Varien, Inc, a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.

Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, the former CEO of Varien, later sold a share of the company to eBay, which eventually completely acquired and then sold the company to Permira; Permira later sold it to Adobe.

On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released. Among the features changed in V2 are the following: reduced table locking issues, improved page caching, enterprise-grade scalability, inbuilt rich snippets for structured data, new file structure with easier customization, CSS Preprocessing using LESS & CSS URL resolver, improved performance and a more structured code base. Magento employs the MySQL or MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.

Overview

Magento provides two distinct platforms: Magento Open Source (previously Magento Community Edition) and Magento Commerce; the latter is available in an on-premises version (previously Magento Enterprise Edition) or as a platform-as-a-service (previously Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition). There were also two former platforms, Magento Professional Edition, and Magento Go.

Magento Open Source

Magento Open Source, previously Magento Community Edition, is an open-source eCommerce platform. Developers can implement the core files and extend its functionality by adding new plug-in modules provided by other developers. Since the first public beta version was released in 2007, Magento Open Source has been developed and customized in order to provide a basic eCommerce platform.

The current release and each of the previous historical release versions of the 1.X and 2.X version branches of Magento Open Source are available on the Magento Commerce, Inc. website for download as single-file downloads .Development of the 2.X version branch of Magento CE is coordinated publicly on GitHub.  Magento 1.9.3 will reach end-of-life on June 30, 2020.

The latest actively supported versions of Magento Open Source are CE

Magento will remain Open source after the recent acquisition by Adobe