Most Recommended LabVIEW Version for Windows 11?

[Bryan]

I know that LabVIEW 2022Q3 is the earliest version that supports W11 based on NI's website.  However, I'd like to know from others in here what is the most stable/recommended W11 compatible version.  

We're currently using LabVIEW 2020 for development on some older W11 machines, but new machines that we're being given for some reason are giving us problems when we try to install the development environment (Forces Windows into a recovery loop after installation).  So, we figured it's about time to migrate to a newer version.  

We don't 'upgrade' very often, so we want to make sure that whatever version we pick will work for us for as long as possible until we must upgrade again.

Edited Thursday at 04:48 PM by Bryan

[crossrulz]

I've generally been recommending using at least 2025 because the project dependency list is no longer saved in the project file (it got recalculated at loading anyways), making GIT commits cleaner. And the in-place save for previous (introduced with 2024) is really nice to have.

I have been using 2026Q1 for my development, including a major refactoring of my HAL architecture. I've had very few issues, almost all of which were fixed by clearing the object compile cache regularly (something I have a habit of doing anyways since at least 2016).

And just to throw it out there, we are expecting 2026Q3 to drop any day now. No promises from NI on a date, but we are in Q3 now.

[Mads]

2020 was my favourite for a long time as we had issues on RT with many of the later versions. 2025 Q3 has been stable both on Win 11 and RT although the Linux RT Images are too bloated for some of the smaller sb/cRIO targets 😞.

I did try to switch to 2026 when it came out, but ran into serious VISA issues on RT with it (which NI says has been fixed now).

The next version we will move to is the upcoming 2026Q3 unless any issues show up during testing. It will include "native" SBOM-support which is good to have for the EU CRA requirements that kick in later this year (Still hoping for more significant feature updates soon though. The 40 year anniversary would have been a great time for some of those... 😮)

[hooovahh]

2022 Q3 is still the large majority of our projects.  Windows 11 support 64 bit RT, and things work fairly well.  Yes like others have said some compile cache issues but very happy.  We are migrating to 2025 Q1 as needed. I haven't used it as much as I have 2022 Q3, but it seems fairly good so far.  I have seen a compile cache issue in 2025 Q1, and I have seen an RT related crash with XNet in development where the build was stable. So not all the confidence in the world but fine.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 7/23/2026 at 6:45 PM, Bryan said:

I know that LabVIEW 2022Q3 is the earliest version that supports W11 based on NI's website.  However, I'd like to know from others in here what is the most stable/recommended W11 compatible version.  

We're currently using LabVIEW 2020 for development on some older W11 machines, but new machines that we're being given for some reason are giving us problems when we try to install the development environment (Forces Windows into a recovery loop after installation).  So, we figured it's about time to migrate to a newer version.  

We don't 'upgrade' very often, so we want to make sure that whatever version we pick will work for us for as long as possible until we must upgrade again.

The recovery loop forcing is most likely related to the installation of DAQmx and other NI driver software that make under the hood use of NI-PAL and friends which is really part of the NI-PXI driver software stack. This driver goes fairly deep into the Windows PCI hardware driver stack and newer Windows versions tend to enable the newest features in the PCI chipsets. Some of these features did not even exist in the standard when DAQmx and NI-PAL that come with the standard install of LabVIEW 2020 were released.

So if you want to install an older version of LabVIEW on a recent hardware, it is actually best to choose a custom install and disable installation of all hardware drivers and then install the latest version of the drivers you actually need that are still compatible with your LabVIEW version. That's of course cumbersome and the long term solution is indeed to move to a newer LabVIEW version altogether. But be aware that this problem will keep occurring. The times where hardware improvements were automatically always fully backwards compatible are definitely over. The PCI standard got so complicated over the years, and covers much more than just the traditional PCI slots that are almost unseen in modern computers. Pretty much every modern bus from USB3 and higher to Thunderbolt, all kinds of memory interfaces, and many more is nowadays using PCI technologies in one way or the other. Improving that without causing potential backwards compatibility problems got an almost impossible task. And each of the software component manufacturers from hardware firmware, to BIOS and chipset firmware to Windows drivers and vendor drivers such as NI-PAL would need to test their thing with everything else to be sure it still works. Which of course is impossible, so you end up with these issues.

For LabVIEW itself I managed to install and use LabVIEW 2009 on Windows 11 without any real problems. I'm convinced that even LabVIEW 7.1 would be possible, although that most likely would require some careful hand holding and sweet talking to the installer to convince it to go fully through with it. And it might show some visual artefacts when running it under Windows 11. Hardware drivers on the other hand are a different story. The NI drivers go fairly deep into the system to allow high performance data acquisition and similar things and that has a big potential to run into compatibility trouble on newer hardware than what was available at the release date of the driver.

Edited 59 minutes ago by Rolf Kalbermatter