Presented herein are traffic pruning techniques that define the pruning at the group level. A software defined network (SDN) controller determines first and second endpoint groups (EPGs) of an SDN associated with the SDN controller. The SDN runs on a plurality of networking devices that interconnect a plurality of endpoints that are each attached to one or more host devices. The SDN controller determines a host-EPG mapping for the SDN, as well as a networking device-host mapping for the SDN. The SDN controller then uses the host-EPG mapping, the networking device-host mapping, and one or more group-based policies associated with traffic sent from the first EPG to the second EPG to compute hardware pruning policies defining how to prune multi-destination traffic sent from the first EPG to the second EPG. The hardware pruning policies are then installed in one or more of the networking devices or the host devices.