You can certainly disable collision in a group-wise manner in UE4. You just need to set up object types and profiles in the project settings - there is some more info here: Collision Filtering - Unreal Engine
We would like to avoid global pairwise disabling because this could add significant cost to all collisions, as they would all need to do a lookup in this global table. We already have problems with performance for collisions within a PhysicsAsset where you can disable on a pairwise basis.