Electrochemical micromachining (EMM) appears to be a very promising micromachining process for having higher machining rate, better precision and control, reliability, flexibility, environmental acceptability, and capability of machining a wide range of materials. It permits machining of chemically resistant materials, like titanium, copper alloys, super alloys and stainless steel to be used in biomedical, electronic, micro-electromechanical system and nano-electromechanical system applications. Therefore, the optimal use of an EMM process for achieving enhanced machining rate and improved profile accuracy demands selection of its various machining parameters. Various optimization tools, primarily Derringer’s desirability function approach have been employed by the past researchers for deriving the best parametric settings of EMM processes, which inherently lead to sub-optimal or near optimal solutions. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply an almost new optimization tool, i.e. differential search algorithm (DSA) for parametric optimization of three EMM processes. A comparative study of optimization performance between DSA, genetic algorithm and desirability function approach proves the wide acceptability of DSA as a global optimization tool.