Magento is an open-source content management system for e-commerce web sites. 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, former CEO of Varien, later sold a substantial share of the company to eBay, which is now the sole owner.

According to the research conducted by aheadWorks in May 2015, Magento's market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 29.8%.

Magento employs the MySQL/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.