Deprecated KNIME Nodes in Source Repositories and User Workflows

This study quantitatively analyzed deprecated functionality in visual workflows as represented in KNIME’s open-source code repositories and retained in collected workflow examples. We found that deprecated nodes are not a marginal phenomenon either on the KNIME platform or in workflows created by KNIME users. We reconstructed 13 source-date snapshots of the public knime-oss repositories between April 2018 and June 2026 and parsed their structured extension and compatibility metadata. Across these snapshots, the number of deprecated nodes increased from 193 of 1301 (14.83%) in the 2018 baseline to 502 of 1506 (33.33%) in the latest snapshot. In addition, using the latest snapshot, we built a deprecated-node registry and joined its factory-class identifiers to 2745 node occurrences in 62 workflows uploaded by users to k2pweb.org between 2026-03-25 and 2026-07-15. We found that 294 of the 2745 node occurrences (10.71%) were deprecated and that 21 of the 62 workflows (33.87%) contained at least one deprecated node. This study is important because visual workflows depend on evolving platform components, and deprecation can complicate their later reuse and reproduction.