I am stuck as a developer trying to explore Salesforce for integrating with my CRM which is used by our clients as SaaS.
Background of what i want to achieve in the integration
The idea is that my CRM software allows many features that Salesforce does not and vice-versa. Due to this a typical client who is using my CRM (Saas) ends up using both the softwares. This ends into duplication of efforts where for eg: a customer created in my CRM has to be copied over to Salesforce manually from Salesforce UI.
The integration that i wish to provide will work like a 2 way integration where a customer created from my CRM gets created as Accounts in Salesforce and vice-versa. Same way sync of edits and deletes across the 2 system should work.
Problem that i am having
When i started exploring Salesforce integration, i found that Salesforce allows integration to be done in below ways
Apex trigger based system - I was able to achieve 2 way syncing with Salesforce and my CRM using Apex approach. But the problem is it requires me to access their web api's to send data from my CRM to Salesforce. This feature is only supported in higher pricing plans of Salesforce (Enterprise, Unlimited, Professional - you have to pay extra if you are using professional)
App based approach (eg: Slack): I am looking more towards this approach. As Slack integration works for almost all pricing plans and is supported well. What i could not conclude clearly is - how can i create an App for my CRM and get it listed on Salesforce? How does Salesforce allow an App based access from Slack to submit data into Salesforce system for lower pricing plans. Their documentation says that Api access is only available for higher pricing plans. Then how is this achieved? For eg: you can install Salesforce app into Slack and there after you can send messages to chatter service under individual accounts of Salesforce from Slack.
I am really not sure if i have given enough insight into the problem i am having. But i tried explaining as much as possible. In short i want to integrate 2 way with Salesforce and i am looking for possible solution that is supported at lower pricing plans as well. What type of integration should i go forward with?