Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is used as a therapeutic procedure to treat symptoms of several neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders by controlling electrical activity of neural circuits. In particular it is used to treat motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD), associated with excessive oscillatory synchronized activity in the beta frequency band. An alternative way to stimulate neural circuits is an emerging technology of optogenetics. It is not clear when/if optogenetics will eventually be possible to implement in clinical practice. However, it is emerging as a widely used experimental tool to control brain networks. Thus, the goal of his study is to explore how effective an optogenetic stimulation in comparison with electrical stimulation in their network effects on elevated synchronized oscillatory activity. We use a computational model of subthalamic and pallidal circuits, which was developed to reproduce experimentally observed beta-band activity patterns. We model electrical stimulation as well as optogenetic stimulation of two types (excitatory via channelrhodopsin and inhibitory via halorodopsin). All three modes of stimulation can decrease beta synchrony. The actions of different stimulation types on the beta activity differ from each other. Electrical DBS and optogenetic excitation have somewhat similar effects on the network. They both cause desynchronization and suppression of the beta-band bursting. As intensity of stimulation is growing, they synchronize the network at higher (non-beta) frequencies in almost tonic dynamics. Optogenetic inhibition effectively reduces spiking and bursting activity of the targeted neurons. We compare the stimulation modes in terms of the minimal effective current delivered to basal ganglia neurons in order to suppress beta activity below a threshold. Optogenetic inhibition usually requires less effective current than electrical DBS to achieve beta suppression. Optogenetic excitation, while as not efficacious as optogenetic inhibition, still usually requires less effective current than electrical DBS to suppress beta activity. Our results suggest that optogenetic stimulation may introduce smaller effective currents than conventional electrical DBS, but still achieve sufficient beta activity suppression. Thus, optogenetic stimulation may be more effective than electrical stimulation in control of synchronized oscillatory neural activity because of the different ways of how stimulations interact with network dynamics.