Systems and methods provide for enabling multicast-based performance routing and policy controls for software-defined networking in a wide area network deployment including a multicast application-route policy based on sources, groups, receivers, dynamic application-route policy path selection from multicast replicators, and application-route SLA switchover across paths and multicast replicators based on SD-WAN multicast routing architecture; and dynamically selecting SD-WAN multicast replicators based on policies for replication including allowed multicast groups, geographic location, bandwidth indications, system load, and performance, and switching over dynamically across multicast replicators based real-time multicast replicator status updates.