EViews offers a wide variety of built-in estimation methods that involve optimization, including (but not limited to) those supported by the Equation, System, Sspace, and VAR objects.

In addition, the EViews Logl object lets you maximize user-defined likelihood functions. While useful in a wide range of settings, the Logl object is nevertheless restricted in the types of functions that it can handle. In particular, the Logl requires that all computations be specified using series expressions, and that the log-likelihood objective can be expressed as a series containing log-likelihood contributions for each observation.

In contrast, the optimize command provides tools that allow you to find the optimal parameters or control values of a user-defined function. Notably, optimize supports quite general functions so that the computations and the user-defined objective need not be series-based.