Owing to the superior energy and power storage properties, the Zr doped BaTiO3 (BZT) material system is reportedly used in numerous applications. In this work, the optimal process parameters viz., substrate temperature, oxygen gas pressure, laser fluence and target-substrate distance for deposition of lead-free thin films using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) system were evaluated. The deposition of BZT thin films were carried out based on design of experiments by adopting the Taguchi method. The thickness and dielectric properties of deposited thin films were analyzed to assess the influence of each parameter on the growth of thin films using analysis of variance (ANOVA) method. Optimal process conditions based on grey relational analysis were evaluated. The phase and morphology analysis on BZT films indicate possibility of domain engineering by choosing appropriate process variables. BZT thin films deposited at optimal process conditions resulted in superior properties comparable to properties of single crystal of the same material system. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.