Let N, k be positive integers and let q be a prime power. Let \(\mathcal {G}_q(N,k)\) denote the set of all \({\mathbb {F}}_q\) -subspaces of \({\mathbb {F}}_{q^N}\) with dimension k. In this paper, We propose two classes of optimal multi-orbit cyclic subspace codes using new combinatorial approaches. The first construction enlarges the size of optimal cyclic subspace codes by improving a class of the Sidon spaces presented by Zhang and Ge (J Algebr Comb 55:781–794, 2022). For any positive integers N, k and prime power q such that \(N\ge 4k-1\) and \(N|(q-1)\) , we establish new multi-orbit cyclic subspace codes in \(\mathcal {G}_q(N,k)\) with optimal minimum distance \(2k-2\) . The second construction makes use of variants of the Sidon spaces introduced by Roth et al. (IEEE Trans Inf Theory 64(6):4412–4422, 2018). We give a new lower bound for cyclic subspace codes in \(\mathcal {G}_q(N,k)\) , where k is a factor of N and q is a prime power.