The best arcade games like Contra are Contra III: The Alien Wars, Metal Slug 3 and Blazing Chrome. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to arcade costs you.
Filtering to arcade means you want short runs and a score, not a campaign. It is the right filter when what you liked was the one-more-go feeling.
What you get: A complete experience in twenty minutes, and a skill you keep. Arcade design is measured in the moment after you lose.
What made Contra worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the arcade part of that answer, and only the arcade part.
The SNES entry, and the high point of the series.
The most generous run-and-gun ever made, and superb in co-op.
Made specifically to be Contra again, and it succeeds.
Treasure's Genesis run-and-gun, and mechanically richer.
The modern remake, and a solid entry point.
Destructible run-and-gun chaos, four players, very funny.
A polished modern arcade run-and-gun with great co-op.
One-hit-kill run-and-gun with a cartoon look.
Story and progression. Arcade games repeat on purpose, and if you want to be pulled somewhere they will not do it.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Contra that are not arcade games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Contra — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Contra III: The Alien Wars. The SNES entry, and the high point of the series.
No. Contra released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
They were designed to end. A machine that let you play for an hour on one coin did not earn its floor space, so difficulty was the business model.
Constantly, mostly by small teams. Several of the best beat-em-ups and run-and-guns of the last decade are new games built on forty-year-old design rules.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Contra list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is arcade — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the arcade guide for where to start in the genre generally.