Is it a good trade? To me it seems like maintaining a gem/library is less complex than maintaining a service that exposes the functionality of said gem. No netw

Is it a good trade? To me it seems like maintaining a gem/library is less complex than maintaining a service that exposes the functionality of said gem. No networking, deployment configuration, request handling, parsing, host monitoring, logging, access control, etc to deal with. Which do you think is more complex?