Connecting different softwares together

I have some desktop softwares built with Java Swing and some web applications built with Symfony and they have some common tables in database like Projects and Clients and what I want to do is to find a solution to make desktop apps load data from the web apps.

For example I have a StockManager app (on the web) and EmployeesManager app (desktop) and both of them have the Employee table that contains list of employees of the company, I want the CRUD functions in the desktop app to be removed and available only in the web app and and each time we add an employe to the StockManager app the EmployeesManager, when I open it, should have this new employee available.

What is the best solution to achieve this ?

What I did: I have tried before to connect my desktop app to a remote database but I found that this is impossible for simple hosting and you must have a VPS to open remote connection to a database, but in my case I don't have VPS so is there any other way to make this happen?