Magento is an open source based ecommerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc.. Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the Entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data. The Magento Community Edition is the only free version of Magento available. All other versions of Magento are not free.